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

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

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

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

Burgess, Anthony

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

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

10.

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

Hellman, Lillian

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

Goodman, Ellen

13.

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

Bach, Richard

14.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Churchill, Charles

18.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

19.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

20.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

21.

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.

22.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

23.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

Miller, Olin

26.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

27.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

28.

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.

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

31.

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

32.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

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

34.

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

35.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

Asimov, Isaac

37.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

38.

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

Canetti, Elias

39.

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

40.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

41.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

42.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

43.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

44.

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

45.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

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

Mortimer, John

47.

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

Martin, Judith

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel