Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Pascal, Blaise

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Faulkner, William

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

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

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

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

10.

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

Martin, Judith

11.

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

12.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

13.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

14.

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

Woolf, Virginia

15.

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

16.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

18.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

19.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

20.

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

Doren, Carl Van

21.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

22.

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

23.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

24.

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

Gribbon, George

25.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

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.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

28.

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

29.

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

Benchley, Robert

30.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

31.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

32.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

37.

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

Pascal, Blaise

38.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Faulkner, William

42.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

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