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

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

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

Thurber, James

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

10.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

Churchill, Charles

12.

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

13.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

14.

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

Vries, Peter De

15.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

16.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

17.

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

18.

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

19.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

20.

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.

21.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

22.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

28.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

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.

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

31.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

34.

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

35.

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

36.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

37.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

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

42.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

43.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

44.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

45.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

48.

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

Goodman, Ellen

49.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

50.

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