Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Nabokov, Vladimir

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

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

Sand, George

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

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

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

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

Russell, Bertrand

11.

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

Kesey, Ken

12.

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.

13.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

14.

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

15.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

20.

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

Thurber, James

21.

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

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

Rushdie, Salman

23.

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

24.

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

Handke, Peter

25.

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

Nicolson, Harold

26.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

28.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

29.

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

30.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

31.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

32.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

33.

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

34.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

35.

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

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

39.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

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.

42.

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

Goodman, Ellen

43.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

44.

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

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

47.

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

Hazlitt, William

48.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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

Corbett, James J.

50.

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