Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Rushdie, Salman

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Zinsser, William

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

Wilde, Oscar

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

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

Thurber, James

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

13.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

14.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

15.

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

16.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

17.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

18.

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

19.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

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.

22.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

23.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

24.

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

Dyer, Wayne

25.

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

Bach, Richard

26.

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

27.

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

Russell, Bertrand

28.

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

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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

30.

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

Churchill, Charles

31.

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

32.

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

Hazlitt, William

33.

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

Steinbeck, John

34.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

38.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

39.

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

40.

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

41.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

44.

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

Raine, Craig

45.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

46.

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

47.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

48.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

49.

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.

50.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day