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

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

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

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Pascal, Blaise

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

Canetti, Elias

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

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

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

10.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

11.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

12.

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

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.

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

15.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

16.

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

Martin, Judith

17.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

18.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Thurber, James

20.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

21.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

24.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

25.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

26.

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

27.

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

Woolf, Virginia

28.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

29.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

31.

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

32.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

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

34.

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

Sand, George

35.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

36.

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

Faulkner, William

37.

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

38.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

39.

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

Dennis, Patrick

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

42.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

43.

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

44.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

45.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

46.

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

Porter, Cole

47.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

48.

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

49.

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

Kraus, Karl

50.

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

Dahlberg, Edward