Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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 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

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

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

Hemingway, Ernest

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

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

Sand, George

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

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

10.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

11.

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

Kesey, Ken

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

14.

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

15.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

16.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

17.

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

Baldwin, James

18.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

19.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

21.

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

Doren, Carl Van

22.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

26.

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

27.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

28.

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

29.

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

Zinsser, William

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

33.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

34.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

35.

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.

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

38.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

39.

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

40.

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

41.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

42.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Porter, Cole

48.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

49.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

50.

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

Hellman, Lillian