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

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

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

Gribbon, George

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

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

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.

10.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

11.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

12.

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

Nunn, Gregory

13.

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

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

15.

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

16.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

17.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

19.

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

Zinsser, William

20.

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

Bach, Richard

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

24.

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

25.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

26.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

29.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

30.

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

31.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

35.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

36.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

37.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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.

40.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

41.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

43.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

44.

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

45.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

46.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

Bennett, Arnold

49.

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

Hutchens, John K.

50.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William