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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Fadiman, Clifton

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

James, 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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Thurber, James

10.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

11.

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

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.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

14.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

18.

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

Goodman, Ellen

19.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

20.

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

Faulkner, William

21.

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

Steinem, Gloria

22.

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

23.

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

Corbett, James J.

24.

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

Nunn, Gregory

25.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

26.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

27.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

28.

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

29.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

30.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

32.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

33.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

35.

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

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

37.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

38.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

39.

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

Forster, Edward M.

40.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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.

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.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

45.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

46.

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

47.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

48.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

49.

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.

50.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William