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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Handke, Peter

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Miller, Olin

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

Burgess, Anthony

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

10.

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

11.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

12.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

13.

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

14.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

15.

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

Pound, Ezra

16.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

18.

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.

19.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

20.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

21.

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

Ferber, Edna

22.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

24.

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

25.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

29.

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

Porter, Cole

30.

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

Mortimer, John

31.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

32.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

Collins, Jackie

35.

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

36.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

37.

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

38.

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

Liebling, A. J.

39.

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

40.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

41.

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

Swift, Jonathan

42.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

43.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

44.

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

Kraus, Karl

45.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

47.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

48.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

49.

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

50.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord