Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

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

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

Anderson, Margaret

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

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

Porter, Cole

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

Byron, Lord

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

10.

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

11.

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

Mortimer, John

12.

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

Dennis, Patrick

13.

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

Butler, Samuel

14.

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

15.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

16.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

17.

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

Rice, Anne

18.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

19.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

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

21.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

22.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

23.

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

Faulkner, William

24.

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

25.

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

Pound, Ezra

26.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

27.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

31.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

32.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

33.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

37.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

38.

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

39.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

40.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

41.

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

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

46.

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

Faulkner, William

47.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

48.

Writing is a craft not an art.