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

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

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

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

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

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

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

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

10.

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

11.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

12.

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

Woolf, Virginia

13.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

14.

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

Corbett, James J.

15.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

16.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

17.

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

Nunn, Gregory

18.

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.

19.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

Hellman, Lillian

24.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

25.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

26.

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

Ellman, Lucy

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

Hellman, Lillian

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.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

31.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

32.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

33.

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

Horace

34.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

35.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

43.

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

Faulkner, William

44.

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

45.

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

Doren, Carl Van

46.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

47.

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

James, William

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

50.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George