Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

- Shaw, George Bernard

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

10.

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

Hutchens, John K.

11.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

13.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

Nicolson, Harold

15.

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

Freud, Sigmund

16.

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

17.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

18.

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

Baldwin, James

19.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

20.

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

Asimov, Isaac

21.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Hazlitt, William

25.

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

26.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

28.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

29.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

30.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

35.

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

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.

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

38.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

39.

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

Doren, Carl Van

40.

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

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

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

Bennett, Arnold

43.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

44.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

45.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

46.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

47.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

48.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

49.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

50.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George