Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

- Pascal, Blaise

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

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

James, William

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

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

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.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

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.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

13.

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

14.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

15.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

18.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

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

Marquis, Don

20.

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

Vries, Peter De

21.

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

Raine, Craig

22.

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

Orwell, George

23.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

25.

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

26.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

27.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

28.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

29.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

30.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

31.

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

32.

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

Liebling, A. J.

33.

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

Zinsser, William

34.

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

Zinsser, William

35.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

36.

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

37.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

38.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

39.

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

Freud, Sigmund

40.

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

41.

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

Sand, George

42.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

44.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

45.

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

Benchley, Robert

46.

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

Pascal, Blaise

47.

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

Rushdie, Salman

48.

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

49.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

50.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra