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

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

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

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

Doren, Carl Van

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

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

Marquis, Don

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

14.

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

15.

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

Pound, Ezra

16.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

18.

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

Faulkner, William

19.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

20.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

21.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

24.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

28.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

29.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

30.

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

Martin, Judith

31.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Thurber, James

35.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

36.

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

Baldwin, James

37.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

38.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

41.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

42.

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

43.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

44.

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

Faulkner, William

45.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

46.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

47.

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

Joyce, James

48.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

49.

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.

50.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret