Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

- Russell, Bertrand

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Ferber, Edna

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Hellman, Lillian

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.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Steinbeck, John

10.

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

Miller, Olin

11.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

12.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

13.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

14.

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

15.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

16.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

17.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

18.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

19.

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

20.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

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.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

23.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

24.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

25.

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

Faulkner, William

26.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

27.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

28.

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

29.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

30.

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

Sontag, Susan

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

34.

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

Horace

35.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

36.

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.

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.

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

Baldwin, James

39.

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

Asimov, Isaac

40.

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

Steinbeck, John

41.

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

Pascal, Blaise

42.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

43.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

44.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

45.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

46.

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

47.

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

48.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

49.

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

50.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold