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

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

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

Kraus, Karl

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

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

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

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Baldwin, James

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

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

12.

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

13.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

14.

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

15.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

16.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

17.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

18.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

19.

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

Martin, Judith

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

24.

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

25.

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

Vries, Peter De

26.

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

Nicolson, Harold

27.

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

Freud, Sigmund

28.

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

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.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

31.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

32.

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

Anderson, Margaret

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

35.

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

Hellman, Lillian

36.

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.

37.

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

Twain, Mark

38.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

39.

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

40.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

41.

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

Doren, Carl Van

42.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

43.

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

Benchley, Robert

44.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

45.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

47.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks