Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

- Pirandello, Luigi

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

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

Faulkner, William

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

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

Marx, Groucho

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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.

10.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

12.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

13.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

14.

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

15.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

16.

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

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

18.

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

Rice, Anne

19.

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

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

22.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

23.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

24.

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

Benchley, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

Martin, Judith

27.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

30.

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

Thurber, James

31.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

Dennis, Patrick

34.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

35.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

36.

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

Doren, Carl Van

37.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

38.

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

39.

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

Anderson, Margaret

40.

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

41.

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

Butler, Samuel

42.

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

43.

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

Churchill, Charles

44.

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

45.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

46.

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

47.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

48.

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

49.

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

Woolf, Virginia

50.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris