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

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

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Hazlitt, William

11.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

13.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

14.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

15.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

16.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

17.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

20.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

21.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

22.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

23.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

28.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

29.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

34.

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

Collins, Jackie

35.

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

36.

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

Asimov, Isaac

37.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

38.

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.

39.

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

Rushdie, Salman

40.

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

Freud, Sigmund

41.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

42.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

43.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

44.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

45.

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

46.

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

Kraus, Karl

47.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

49.

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

50.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.