Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Sand, George

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

10.

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

Thurber, James

11.

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

12.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

13.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

14.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

15.

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

Faulkner, William

16.

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

Joyce, James

17.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

22.

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.

23.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

24.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

25.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

26.

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

27.

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

Pascal, Blaise

28.

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

29.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

31.

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

Asimov, Isaac

32.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

33.

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

34.

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

Rushdie, Salman

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

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

37.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

38.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

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

42.

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

Faulkner, William

43.

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

Corbett, James J.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Marx, Groucho

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker