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

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

Shaw, Irwin

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

Faulkner, William

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

Pound, Ezra

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

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Miller, Olin

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

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

Ellman, Lucy

14.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

18.

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

Nicolson, Harold

19.

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

20.

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

Faulkner, William

21.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

22.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

23.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

24.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

25.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

27.

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

Byron, Lord

28.

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

29.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

30.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

31.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

32.

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

Burgess, Anthony

33.

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

34.

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

35.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

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

Bennett, Arnold

38.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

39.

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

40.

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

Steinbeck, John

41.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

42.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

James, William

47.

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

Marx, Groucho

48.

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

49.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

50.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan