Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Rushdie, Salman

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Byron, Lord

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.

10.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

11.

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

Porter, Cole

12.

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

13.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

14.

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

Steinem, Gloria

15.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

16.

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

Bach, Richard

17.

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

Handke, Peter

18.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

19.

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

Duncan, Isadora

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

24.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

25.

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

26.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

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

Rushdie, Salman

28.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

29.

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

30.

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

Nunn, Gregory

31.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

32.

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

Forster, Edward M.

33.

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.

34.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

Joyce, James

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Marx, Groucho

39.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

44.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

45.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

46.

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

Pascal, Blaise

47.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

48.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

49.

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

50.

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

Swift, Jonathan