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

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Thurber, James

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

Gribbon, George

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

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

10.

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

Hellman, Lillian

11.

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

12.

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

Faulkner, William

13.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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.

15.

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

Paz, Octavio

16.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

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

Shaw, Irwin

19.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

20.

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

Sand, George

21.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

24.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

25.

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

26.

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

Mortimer, John

27.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

28.

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

Steinbeck, John

29.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

30.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

31.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

32.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

33.

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

Joyce, James

34.

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

Rosten, Leo

35.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

36.

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

Russell, Bertrand

37.

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

Hellman, Lillian

38.

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

Benchley, Robert

39.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

40.

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

Freud, Sigmund

41.

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

42.

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

Liebling, A. J.

43.

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

44.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

45.

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

Marx, Groucho

46.

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

47.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

48.

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

Collins, Jackie

49.

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

50.

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