Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Mortimer, John

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Corbett, James J.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

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

Rosten, Leo

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

10.

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

11.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

12.

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

Butler, Samuel

13.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

14.

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

Burgess, Anthony

15.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

16.

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

17.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

18.

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

19.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

20.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

21.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

22.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

23.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

24.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

25.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

26.

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

27.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

28.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

29.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

30.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

31.

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

Steinem, Gloria

32.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

33.

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

34.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

35.

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

Marx, Groucho

36.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

37.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

38.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

39.

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

40.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Churchill, Charles

44.

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

Swift, Jonathan

45.

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

Marquis, Don

46.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

47.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

48.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

49.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

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