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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Ellman, Lucy

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

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

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

10.

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

11.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

14.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

15.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

16.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

18.

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

Liebling, A. J.

19.

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

20.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

21.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

22.

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

23.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Kesey, Ken

31.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

32.

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

33.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

35.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

37.

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

Dennis, Patrick

38.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

40.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

44.

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

Orwell, George

45.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

46.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

47.

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

Steinem, Gloria

48.

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

Benchley, Robert

49.

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.

50.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.