Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

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

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

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Miller, Olin

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

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

10.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

11.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Orwell, George

16.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

17.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

18.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

19.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

20.

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

Steinbeck, John

21.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

22.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

23.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

24.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

25.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

26.

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

Murdoch, Iris

27.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

28.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

29.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

32.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

33.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

39.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

40.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

41.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

Pound, Ezra

43.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

44.

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

45.

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

Swift, Jonathan

46.

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

Dyer, Wayne

47.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

48.

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

49.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

50.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold