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

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

Murdoch, Iris

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Pascal, Blaise

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.

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

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

Ellman, Lucy

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

12.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

13.

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.

14.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

17.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

18.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

19.

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

20.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

21.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

22.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

23.

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

24.

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

Handke, Peter

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

33.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

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

36.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

37.

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

Porter, Cole

38.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

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

40.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

41.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

42.

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

Steinem, Gloria

43.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

44.

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

Goodman, Ellen

45.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

47.

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

48.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

50.

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