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

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.

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

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

10.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

11.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

12.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

20.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

21.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

22.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

23.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

25.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

26.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

27.

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

Collins, Jackie

28.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Ellman, Lucy

32.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

Marquis, Don

34.

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

35.

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

Baldwin, James

36.

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

Anderson, Margaret

37.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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.

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

40.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

41.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

46.

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

Steinem, Gloria

47.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Woolf, Virginia