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

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

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

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

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

Rosten, Leo

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Hellman, Lillian

12.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

13.

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

Shaw, Irwin

14.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

15.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

16.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

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

Asimov, Isaac

19.

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

20.

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

Russell, Bertrand

21.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

22.

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

Zinsser, William

23.

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

Martin, Judith

24.

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

Paz, Octavio

25.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

26.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

27.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

31.

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

Handke, Peter

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Marquis, Don

39.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

40.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

41.

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

Hutchens, John K.

42.

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

43.

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

Auden, W. H.

44.

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

Zinsser, William

45.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

46.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

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

Murdoch, Iris

48.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

49.

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.

50.

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