Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Mortimer, John

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

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

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Woolf, Virginia

10.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

11.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

12.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

13.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

14.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

15.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

16.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

17.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

18.

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

Joyce, James

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

22.

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

23.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

26.

Sagan, Francoise

27.

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

Zinsser, William

28.

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

Dennis, Patrick

29.

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

30.

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

Thurber, James

31.

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

Baldwin, James

32.

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

33.

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

Pascal, Blaise

34.

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

Rushdie, Salman

35.

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

36.

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

James, William

37.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

38.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

39.

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

Thurber, James

40.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

41.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

42.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

43.

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

44.

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

Shaw, Irwin

45.

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

Liebling, A. J.

46.

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

Benchley, Robert

47.

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

48.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

49.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

50.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph