Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Miller, Olin

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Miller, Olin

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

10.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

12.

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

13.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

14.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

15.

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

Bennett, Arnold

16.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

17.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

18.

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

Joyce, James

19.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

Liebling, A. J.

21.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

22.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

23.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

24.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

25.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

28.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

29.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

30.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

31.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

32.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

33.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

34.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

36.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

37.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

38.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

39.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

40.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

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.

42.

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

Ferber, Edna

43.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

44.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

45.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

46.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

47.

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

Nicolson, Harold

48.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

49.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

50.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.