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

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

Mortimer, John

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

Nicolson, Harold

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

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

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

Bach, Richard

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

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

Naipaul, V. S.

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

Woolf, Virginia

10.

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

11.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

14.

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

Asimov, Isaac

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

18.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

19.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

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

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.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

24.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

25.

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

Canetti, Elias

26.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

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

28.

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

Hazlitt, William

29.

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

Woolf, Virginia

30.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

Paz, Octavio

32.

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

Baldwin, James

33.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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

Collins, Jackie

36.

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

37.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

38.

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

Steinbeck, John

39.

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

Marx, Groucho

40.

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

41.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

42.

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

Auden, W. H.

43.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

44.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Rosten, Leo

49.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

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