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

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

Hutchens, John K.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

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

Marx, Groucho

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

Dyer, Wayne

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

10.

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

Gribbon, George

11.

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

Sand, George

12.

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

13.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

14.

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

Anderson, Margaret

15.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

16.

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

17.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

18.

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

Horace

19.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

20.

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

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

24.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

25.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

26.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

27.

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

28.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

29.

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

Zinsser, William

30.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

31.

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

32.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

34.

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

35.

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

Bennett, Arnold

36.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

37.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

38.

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

Shaw, Irwin

39.

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

James, William

40.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

41.

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

Kesey, Ken

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

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

Nunn, Gregory

45.

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

Bach, Richard

46.

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

Benchley, Robert

47.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.