Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

- Pope, Alexander

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

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

Steinbeck, John

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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.

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

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

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

Rice, Anne

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

13.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

14.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

15.

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

Horace

16.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

17.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

18.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

19.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

20.

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

Dyer, Wayne

21.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

22.

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

Bennett, Arnold

23.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

24.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

28.

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

29.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

30.

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

Martin, Judith

31.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

32.

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

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Hellman, Lillian

35.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

36.

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

Steinbeck, John

37.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

38.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

39.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

42.

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

43.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

44.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

45.

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

Benchley, Robert

46.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

47.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

48.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Kraus, Karl

50.

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

Mencken, H. L.