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

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

Zinsser, William

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Benchley, Robert

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Sontag, Susan

10.

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

Burgess, Anthony

11.

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

12.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

17.

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

18.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

19.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

20.

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

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Ferber, Edna

23.

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

Asimov, Isaac

24.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

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.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

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

Nunn, Gregory

31.

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

Porter, Cole

32.

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.

33.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

34.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

35.

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

36.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

38.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

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.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

41.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

42.

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

43.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

44.

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

Rice, Anne

45.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

46.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

47.

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