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

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

Nicolson, Harold

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Zinsser, William

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

Joyce, James

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

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

10.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

11.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

12.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

13.

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

14.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

15.

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

16.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

17.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

18.

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

19.

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

Rice, Anne

20.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

21.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

22.

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

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

25.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

26.

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

Rushdie, Salman

27.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

28.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

James, William

31.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Freud, Sigmund

35.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

Asimov, Isaac

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

48.

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

Horace

49.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

50.

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

Shaw, Irwin