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

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

Joyce, James

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

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

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

Zinsser, William

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

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

15.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

16.

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

Bach, Richard

17.

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

Porter, Cole

18.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

19.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

20.

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

Swift, Jonathan

21.

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

Dennis, Patrick

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

26.

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

27.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

28.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

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

Gribbon, George

33.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

34.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

36.

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

37.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

38.

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

39.

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

James, William

40.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

41.

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.

42.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

43.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

44.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

45.

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

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

47.

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

Pascal, Blaise

48.

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

Rice, Anne

49.

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

50.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley