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

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

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

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

Baldwin, James

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

10.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

11.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

12.

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

Burgess, Anthony

13.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

14.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

15.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

16.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

17.

Morrison, Toni

18.

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

19.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

20.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

21.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

22.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

23.

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

Rice, Anne

24.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

27.

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

Rosten, Leo

28.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

32.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

33.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

34.

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

35.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

40.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

42.

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

Liebling, A. J.

43.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

44.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

45.

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

46.

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

Hutchens, John K.

47.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

48.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

49.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

50.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin