Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

- Morrison, Edmund

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

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

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

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

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

Vries, Peter De

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

10.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

11.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

15.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

16.

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

17.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

18.

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

19.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

20.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

21.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

22.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

24.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

25.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

26.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

27.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

28.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

29.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

30.

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

31.

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

Bennett, Arnold

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

34.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

35.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

36.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

37.

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

Burgess, Anthony

38.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

39.

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

Nunn, Gregory

40.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

41.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

43.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

44.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

45.

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

Nicolson, Harold

46.

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

47.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

48.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

49.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

50.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.