Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Naipaul, V. S.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Twain, Mark

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Collins, Jackie

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

Sand, George

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.

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

Faulkner, William

11.

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

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

17.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

18.

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

19.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

20.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

21.

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

22.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

23.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

24.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

25.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

26.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

27.

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

Faulkner, William

28.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

29.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

30.

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

Nunn, Gregory

31.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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.

34.

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

Russell, Bertrand

35.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

37.

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

Butler, Samuel

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

42.

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

Corbett, James J.

43.

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

44.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

45.

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

46.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

47.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

48.

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

49.

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