Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Nunn, Gregory

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

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

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

Steinbeck, John

10.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

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

Pascal, Blaise

12.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

18.

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

Shaw, Irwin

19.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

20.

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

Faulkner, William

21.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

25.

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

26.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

27.

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

Butler, Samuel

28.

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

29.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

30.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

31.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

32.

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

Anderson, Margaret

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Joyce, James

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

40.

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

Paz, Octavio

41.

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

Kesey, Ken

42.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

43.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

44.

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

45.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

47.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

48.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

49.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

50.

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

Vries, Peter De