Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

10.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

11.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

12.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

13.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

14.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

15.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

16.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

17.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

18.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

19.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

20.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

21.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

23.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

24.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

25.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

26.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

27.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

28.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

29.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

30.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

31.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

32.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

33.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

34.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

36.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

37.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

39.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

41.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

42.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

44.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

45.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

47.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

48.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John