Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

Zinsser, William

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

Steinem, Gloria

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

10.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

11.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

13.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

14.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

15.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

16.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

21.

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

Doren, Carl Van

22.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

23.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

24.

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

25.

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

Freud, Sigmund

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

29.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

30.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

Murdoch, Iris

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

35.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

36.

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

Nicolson, Harold

37.

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

38.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Kraus, Karl

41.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

42.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

43.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

44.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

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

Collins, Jackie

46.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

48.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

49.

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

Rushdie, Salman

50.

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

Goodman, Ellen