Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Landor, Walter Savage

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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.

11.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

14.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

15.

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

16.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

17.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

18.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

19.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

24.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

25.

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

Nicolson, Harold

26.

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

27.

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

Shaw, Irwin

28.

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

29.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

30.

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.

31.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

34.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

35.

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

Hutchens, John K.

36.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

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.

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

Nunn, Gregory

39.

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

Pascal, Blaise

40.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

41.

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

42.

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

Doren, Carl Van

43.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

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.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

47.

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

48.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

49.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

50.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter