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

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Handke, Peter

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

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

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

10.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

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

Burgess, Anthony

13.

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

14.

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

Dennis, Patrick

15.

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.

16.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

17.

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

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Joyce, James

23.

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

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

Pascal, Blaise

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

28.

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

29.

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

Orwell, George

30.

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

Benchley, Robert

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

34.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

39.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

44.

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

Thurber, James

45.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

47.

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

Hutchens, John K.

48.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

50.

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

Marquis, Don