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

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

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

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

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

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

Mortimer, John

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

10.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

11.

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

Swift, Jonathan

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Steinem, Gloria

14.

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

Nunn, Gregory

15.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

16.

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

Pascal, Blaise

17.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

18.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

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

Porter, Cole

23.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

24.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

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

26.

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

Kraus, Karl

27.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

28.

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

Hellman, Lillian

29.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

30.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

31.

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

Corbett, James J.

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

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

34.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

35.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

36.

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

37.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

42.

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

43.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

44.

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

Byron, Lord

45.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

48.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

49.

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.

50.

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

Kesey, Ken