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

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

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

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

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

Kraus, Karl

11.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

12.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

13.

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

14.

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

15.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

19.

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

20.

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

Benchley, Robert

21.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

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

27.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

28.

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

Liebling, A. J.

29.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

30.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

31.

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

Pascal, Blaise

32.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

33.

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

Russell, Bertrand

34.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

35.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

36.

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

37.

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

Sand, George

38.

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

James, William

39.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

40.

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

41.

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

Dyer, Wayne

42.

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

Thurber, James

43.

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

Forster, Edward M.

44.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

45.

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

Faulkner, William

46.

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

47.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

48.

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

Ellman, Lucy

49.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

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.