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

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

Naipaul, V. S.

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

Steinbeck, John

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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

Zinsser, William

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

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.

10.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

11.

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

Sontag, Susan

12.

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

13.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

16.

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

Hutchens, John K.

17.

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

18.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

19.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

20.

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

21.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

22.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

23.

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

24.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

25.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

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

30.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

31.

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

32.

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

Kesey, Ken

33.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

34.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

35.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

36.

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

37.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

38.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

39.

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

40.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

44.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

45.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

46.

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

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

49.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

50.

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