Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

- Murdoch, Iris

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

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

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

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

Kraus, Karl

12.

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

13.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

14.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

15.

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

Goodman, Ellen

16.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

19.

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

20.

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

Benchley, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

24.

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

25.

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

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.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

28.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

29.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

30.

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

Baldwin, James

31.

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

32.

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

Vries, Peter De

33.

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

34.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

37.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

38.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

39.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

40.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

41.

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

42.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

43.

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

Hutchens, John K.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

48.

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

49.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

50.

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