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

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

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

Nunn, Gregory

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

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

10.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

11.

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

12.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

13.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

14.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

15.

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

16.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

18.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

19.

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.

20.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

21.

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

Baldwin, James

22.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

23.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

24.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

25.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

26.

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

27.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

33.

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.

34.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

35.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

37.

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

Murdoch, Iris

38.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

39.

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

Swift, Jonathan

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.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

42.

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

43.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

44.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

45.

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

46.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

47.

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

48.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

49.

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

Benchley, Robert

50.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman