Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Shaw, Irwin

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

Dennis, Patrick

10.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

11.

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

Butler, Samuel

12.

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

13.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

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

15.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

Murdoch, Iris

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

25.

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

Faulkner, William

26.

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

27.

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

28.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

30.

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

Bach, Richard

31.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

32.

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

33.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

Marx, Groucho

35.

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

36.

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

Gribbon, George

37.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

38.

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

Rice, Anne

39.

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

Baldwin, James

40.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

41.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

42.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

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

Mortimer, John

45.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

46.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

47.

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

48.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

49.

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

50.

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