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

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

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

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

10.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

11.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

12.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

14.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

15.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

16.

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

Butler, Samuel

17.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

Hellman, Lillian

19.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

20.

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.

21.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

22.

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

23.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

25.

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

Martin, Judith

26.

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

Shaw, Irwin

27.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

28.

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

Hutchens, John K.

29.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

30.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

31.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

33.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

34.

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

Marx, Groucho

35.

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

36.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

37.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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.

39.

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.

40.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

41.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

42.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

43.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

44.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

45.

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

Rice, Anne

46.

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

47.

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

Handke, Peter

48.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

49.

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

50.

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