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

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.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

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

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

10.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

11.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

12.

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

13.

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

Faulkner, William

14.

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

15.

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

Murdoch, Iris

16.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

17.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

26.

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

Ellman, Lucy

27.

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

Paz, Octavio

28.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

29.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

30.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

31.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

32.

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

Orwell, George

33.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

34.

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

35.

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

Mortimer, John

36.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

37.

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

38.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

39.

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.

40.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

41.

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

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

43.

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

Swift, Jonathan

44.

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

Sand, George

45.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

46.

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.

47.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

48.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

49.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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