Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

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

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

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

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

10.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

11.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

12.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

13.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

14.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

Dyer, Wayne

18.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

19.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

20.

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

Joyce, James

21.

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

22.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

23.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

24.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

25.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

26.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

28.

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

29.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Burgess, Anthony

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

Murdoch, Iris

36.

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

Marx, Groucho

37.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Kesey, Ken

41.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

42.

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

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

Rosten, Leo

44.

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

45.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

47.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

48.

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

Hazlitt, William

49.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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