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

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

Steinbeck, John

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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

Byron, Lord

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

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

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

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

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

Joyce, James

10.

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

11.

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

Hutchens, John K.

12.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

14.

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

Hazlitt, William

15.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

16.

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

Collins, Jackie

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

22.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

23.

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

Marx, Groucho

24.

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

25.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

26.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

30.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

32.

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

33.

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

Zinsser, William

34.

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

35.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

36.

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

37.

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

38.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

45.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

46.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

47.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

48.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

49.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

50.

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