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

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

Faulkner, William

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

Kraus, Karl

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

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.

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

12.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

14.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

15.

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

16.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

17.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

18.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Hazlitt, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

23.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

24.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

27.

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

28.

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

Dennis, Patrick

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Porter, Cole

32.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

33.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

36.

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

37.

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

Forster, Edward M.

38.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Duncan, Isadora

42.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

43.

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

Baldwin, James

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.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

47.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

48.

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

Nunn, Gregory

49.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

50.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard