Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Paz, Octavio

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

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

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

Collins, Jackie

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

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

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

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

Thurber, James

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

10.

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

Martin, Judith

11.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

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

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

Swift, Jonathan

15.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

16.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

17.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

18.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

19.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

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

Vries, Peter De

22.

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

23.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

24.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

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

Shaw, Irwin

26.

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

Horace

27.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Burgess, Anthony

31.

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

32.

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

33.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

36.

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

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

39.

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

Doren, Carl Van

40.

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

Anderson, Margaret

41.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

44.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

Nicolson, Harold

49.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

50.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond