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

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

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

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

Pascal, Blaise

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Woolf, Virginia

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

10.

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

Ferber, Edna

11.

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

12.

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

Marquis, Don

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

15.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

16.

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

17.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

18.

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

Nicolson, Harold

19.

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

Doren, Carl Van

20.

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

Freud, Sigmund

21.

Rau, Santha Rama

22.

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

Nunn, Gregory

23.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Hutchens, John K.

34.

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

Miller, Olin

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.

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

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

39.

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

Steinbeck, John

40.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Rosten, Leo

48.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.