Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Swift, Jonathan

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.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Duncan, Isadora

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

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

Bach, Richard

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

12.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

13.

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

Baldwin, James

14.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

17.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

19.

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

20.

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

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.

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

23.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

24.

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

25.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

27.

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

Pascal, Blaise

28.

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

Thurber, James

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Pascal, Blaise

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

34.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

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

36.

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

Faulkner, William

37.

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

Hutchens, John K.

38.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

39.

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

Rosten, Leo

40.

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

Gribbon, George

41.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

42.

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

Zinsser, William

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

46.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

47.

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

48.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

49.

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

Ferber, Edna

50.

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.