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 more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

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

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

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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

10.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

11.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

12.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

13.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Kesey, Ken

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Freud, Sigmund

18.

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

19.

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

Forster, Edward M.

20.

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

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

23.

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

24.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

25.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Steinbeck, John

28.

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

29.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

30.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

31.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

32.

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

Baldwin, James

33.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

34.

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

Hazlitt, William

35.

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

36.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

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.

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.

39.

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

Sand, George

40.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

42.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

43.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

44.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

45.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

46.

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

Churchill, Charles

47.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

49.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

50.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset