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

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

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

Collins, Jackie

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

Rosten, Leo

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

Steinbeck, John

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

James, William

14.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

15.

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

Faulkner, William

16.

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

Mortimer, John

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

21.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

22.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

23.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

24.

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

Sand, George

25.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

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

Ellman, Lucy

28.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

29.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

30.

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

Woolf, Virginia

31.

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

Horace

32.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

37.

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

38.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

39.

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

Miller, Olin

40.

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

41.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

43.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

44.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

46.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.