Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

Handke, Peter

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

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

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

10.

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

Woolf, Virginia

11.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

12.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

16.

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

17.

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

Forster, Edward M.

18.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

19.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

20.

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

Shaw, Irwin

21.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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.

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

24.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

25.

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

Dyer, Wayne

26.

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

27.

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

Bennett, Arnold

28.

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

Dennis, Patrick

29.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

30.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

32.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Butler, Samuel

37.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

38.

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

Burgess, Anthony

39.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

43.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

44.

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

45.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

46.

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

47.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

48.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

49.

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

50.

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