Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Sand, George

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Naipaul, V. S.

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

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Joyce, James

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

10.

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

Vries, Peter De

11.

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

Zinsser, William

12.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

13.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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.

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

Thurber, James

16.

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

Bennett, Arnold

17.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

18.

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

19.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

20.

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

Goodman, Ellen

21.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

22.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

23.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

24.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

25.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

26.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

27.

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

28.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

29.

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

Benchley, Robert

30.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

31.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

32.

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

Rice, Anne

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Nicolson, Harold

36.

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

37.

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

Steinbeck, John

38.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

39.

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

40.

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

Thurber, James

41.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

42.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

43.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

44.

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

45.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

46.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

49.

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

50.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.