Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

Hellman, Lillian

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Hemingway, Ernest

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

11.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

12.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

13.

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

Rushdie, Salman

14.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

15.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

16.

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

Nunn, Gregory

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Sand, George

21.

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

Faulkner, William

22.

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

Corbett, James J.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

26.

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

Marx, Groucho

27.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

Rice, Anne

29.

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

Byron, Lord

30.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

32.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

33.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

37.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

38.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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.

41.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Churchill, Charles

45.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks