Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

- Orwell, George

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Faulkner, William

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

Marx, Groucho

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

10.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

11.

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

12.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

13.

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

14.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

15.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

16.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

17.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

18.

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

19.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

20.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

21.

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

22.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

23.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

24.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

25.

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

26.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

27.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

28.

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

Anderson, Margaret

29.

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

Zinsser, William

30.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

31.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

33.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

34.

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

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

Collins, Jackie

37.

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

Horace

38.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

43.

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

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

49.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

50.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest