Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Byron, Lord

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

Dennis, Patrick

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

10.

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

11.

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

Steinem, Gloria

12.

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

13.

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

Forster, Edward M.

14.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

15.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

16.

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

17.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

18.

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.

19.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

20.

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

21.

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

Butler, Samuel

22.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

23.

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

Rushdie, Salman

24.

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

25.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

26.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

27.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

28.

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

29.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

30.

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

Faulkner, William

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Mortimer, John

34.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

35.

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

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

37.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

38.

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

39.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

40.

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

Gribbon, George

41.

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

42.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

43.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

44.

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

Sontag, Susan

45.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

46.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

47.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

48.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

49.

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

50.

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

Dahlberg, Edward