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

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

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

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

Doren, Carl Van

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

Dennis, Patrick

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

10.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

11.

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

12.

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

Marx, Groucho

13.

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

14.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

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

Mortimer, John

16.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

18.

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

Asimov, Isaac

19.

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

Liebling, A. J.

20.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

21.

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

Marquis, Don

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.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

24.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

25.

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

26.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

27.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

28.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

29.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

30.

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

31.

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

Johnson, Samuel

32.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

33.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Burgess, Anthony

39.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

40.

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

41.

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

Zinsser, William

42.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

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.

45.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

46.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Benchley, Robert

50.

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

Hemingway, Ernest