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

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Dyer, Wayne

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

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 crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

Benchley, Robert

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

10.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

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

12.

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

Baldwin, James

13.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

14.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

15.

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

Paz, Octavio

16.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

17.

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

18.

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

Sand, George

19.

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

20.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

21.

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

22.

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

Thurber, James

23.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

24.

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

Mortimer, John

25.

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

Kesey, Ken

26.

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

27.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

28.

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

29.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

30.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

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

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

34.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

35.

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

36.

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

Hazlitt, William

37.

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

38.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

39.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

40.

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

41.

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

Bach, Richard

42.

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

43.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

44.

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

45.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

46.

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

47.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

48.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

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

Gribbon, George

50.

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

Faulkner, William