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

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

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

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

Marx, Groucho

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

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

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

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

10.

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

11.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

12.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

15.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

16.

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

Faulkner, William

17.

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

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Rosten, Leo

20.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

21.

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

22.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

25.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

26.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

27.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

28.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

29.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

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.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

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

33.

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

Nicolson, Harold

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Duncan, Isadora

37.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

38.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

39.

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

Bennett, Arnold

40.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

Benchley, Robert

42.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

47.

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

Kesey, Ken

48.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

49.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

50.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna