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

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

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

Ferber, Edna

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Anderson, Margaret

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

10.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

11.

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

12.

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

Johnson, Samuel

13.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

14.

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

15.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

16.

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

17.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

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

19.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

20.

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

21.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

22.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

23.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

24.

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

Miller, Olin

25.

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

Vries, Peter De

26.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

27.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

28.

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

Butler, Samuel

29.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

30.

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

Kesey, Ken

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

33.

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

Sontag, Susan

34.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

39.

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

Pound, Ezra

40.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

41.

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

Kraus, Karl

42.

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

Rice, Anne

43.

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

Faulkner, William

44.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

45.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

46.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

47.

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

48.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

49.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

50.

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

Freud, Sigmund