Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

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

Faulkner, William

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

Duncan, Isadora

10.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

11.

Rau, Santha Rama

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

17.

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

Butler, Samuel

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

20.

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

Rosten, Leo

21.

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

Churchill, Charles

22.

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

23.

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

Marquis, Don

24.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

Faulkner, William

28.

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

Zinsser, William

29.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

Thurber, James

31.

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

Liebling, A. J.

32.

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

Gribbon, George

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

Russell, Bertrand

37.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

38.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

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

41.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

42.

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

Byron, Lord

43.

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

Vries, Peter De

44.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

45.

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

46.

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

Shaw, Irwin

47.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

48.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

49.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

50.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise