Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Raine, Craig

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Steinem, Gloria

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

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

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

Steinbeck, John

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

10.

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.

11.

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

Duncan, Isadora

12.

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

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Sontag, Susan

14.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

15.

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

Zinsser, William

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

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

Butler, Samuel

18.

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

19.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

20.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

21.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

22.

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

Kesey, Ken

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

Goodman, Ellen

28.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

29.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

30.

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

31.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

32.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

33.

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

Nunn, Gregory

34.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

35.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

36.

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

37.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

38.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

39.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

40.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

41.

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

42.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

45.

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.