Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Orwell, George

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Orwell, George

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

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.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

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

Rushdie, Salman

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

Nunn, Gregory

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

11.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

12.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

13.

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

Pascal, Blaise

14.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

15.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

Dennis, Patrick

18.

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

Benchley, Robert

19.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Thurber, James

25.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

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

Zinsser, William

27.

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

James, William

28.

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

Shaw, Irwin

29.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

30.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

Pascal, Blaise

35.

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

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

Steinem, Gloria

38.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

39.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

40.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

41.

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

Sontag, Susan

42.

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

43.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

45.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

46.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

47.

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

Dyer, Wayne

48.

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

49.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.