Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Rosten, Leo

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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

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

Sand, George

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

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

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

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Fadiman, Clifton

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Martin, Judith

13.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

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

Thurber, James

19.

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

Gribbon, George

20.

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

Goodman, Ellen

21.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

22.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

23.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

24.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

25.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

26.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

27.

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

28.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

30.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

31.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

38.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

39.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

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

Doren, Carl Van

41.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

42.

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

Dyer, Wayne

43.

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

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

45.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

47.

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

Auden, W. H.

48.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

49.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

50.

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