Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

- Nicolson, Harold

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

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

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Forster, Edward M.

10.

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

11.

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

Hellman, Lillian

12.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

13.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

14.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

16.

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

Dennis, Patrick

17.

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

Corbett, James J.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

21.

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

22.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

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

Baldwin, James

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Russell, Bertrand

27.

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

28.

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

Bennett, Arnold

29.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

30.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

31.

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

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.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

34.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

35.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

38.

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

Joyce, James

39.

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

40.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

41.

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

Shaw, Irwin

42.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

43.

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

Sand, George

44.

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

Marquis, Don

45.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

49.

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

50.

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

Kraus, Karl