Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

- Pinter, Harold

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

Raine, Craig

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

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

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

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

10.

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

Duncan, Isadora

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

14.

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

15.

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

Faulkner, William

16.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

17.

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

Horace

18.

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

19.

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

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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.

21.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

22.

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

23.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

24.

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.

25.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

26.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

29.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

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

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.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

34.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

35.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

36.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

37.

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

Paz, Octavio

38.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

45.

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

46.

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

Orwell, George

47.

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

48.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

49.

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