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

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

Steinbeck, John

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Benchley, Robert

12.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

13.

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

Canetti, Elias

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

17.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

18.

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

Shaw, Irwin

19.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

20.

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

Orwell, George

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Thurber, James

23.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

24.

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

Marquis, Don

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

28.

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

Handke, Peter

29.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

30.

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

Miller, Olin

31.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

32.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

33.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

34.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

35.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

36.

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

Russell, Bertrand

37.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Pound, Ezra

40.

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

41.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

42.

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.

43.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

44.

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

Nicolson, Harold

45.

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

46.

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

Mortimer, John

47.

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

Joyce, James

48.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

49.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.