Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

- Porter, Cole

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

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

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

10.

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

11.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

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

Zinsser, William

14.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

18.

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

Anderson, Margaret

19.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

20.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

21.

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

22.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

23.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

24.

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

Asimov, Isaac

25.

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

Goodman, Ellen

26.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

27.

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

28.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

Mortimer, John

31.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

32.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Hellman, Lillian

37.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

38.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

42.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Murdoch, Iris

48.

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

Martin, Judith

49.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

50.

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

Butler, Samuel