Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

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 the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

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

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

10.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

11.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

12.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

Hutchens, John K.

14.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Steinem, Gloria

18.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

19.

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

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Murdoch, Iris

22.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

23.

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

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

26.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

27.

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

Rosten, Leo

28.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

29.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

31.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

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

Thurber, James

33.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

34.

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

Shaw, Irwin

35.

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

36.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Liebling, A. J.

41.

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

42.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

43.

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

Rushdie, Salman

44.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

45.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

46.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

47.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan