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

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

Marquis, Don

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

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

Nicolson, Harold

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

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

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

10.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

11.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

12.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

13.

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

Orwell, George

14.

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

Liebling, A. J.

15.

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

16.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

17.

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

Freud, Sigmund

18.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

21.

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

22.

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

Rice, Anne

23.

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

Baldwin, James

24.

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

Murdoch, Iris

25.

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

Faulkner, William

26.

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.

27.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

30.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

31.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

32.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

34.

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

Anderson, Margaret

35.

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

James, William

36.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

37.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

38.

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

39.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

40.

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

Sand, George

41.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

42.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

45.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Collins, Jackie

49.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

50.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James