Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

- Morrison, Toni

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

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

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

10.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

11.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

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

Hellman, Lillian

13.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

14.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

19.

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

20.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

21.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

25.

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

26.

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

Asimov, Isaac

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

30.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

34.

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

35.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

36.

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

Pascal, Blaise

37.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

38.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Thurber, James

42.

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

Forster, Edward M.

43.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

44.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

45.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

46.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

47.

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

48.

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

Steinem, Gloria

49.

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

50.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith