Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

- Pinter, Harold

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Marx, Groucho

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 good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Pascal, Blaise

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.

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

Sand, George

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

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

Hellman, Lillian

10.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

11.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

12.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

13.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

14.

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

15.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

16.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

17.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

Ferber, Edna

21.

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

22.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

23.

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

Martin, Judith

24.

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

Orwell, George

25.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

30.

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

31.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

34.

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

Freud, Sigmund

35.

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.

36.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

37.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

38.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

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

Liebling, A. J.

41.

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

42.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

43.

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

44.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Sontag, Susan

48.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

49.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

50.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar