Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

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

Asimov, Isaac

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

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

Kraus, Karl

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

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

Gribbon, George

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

Burgess, Anthony

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

11.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Ferber, Edna

15.

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

16.

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

Faulkner, William

17.

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

18.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

19.

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

20.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

21.

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

22.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

23.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

24.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

25.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

26.

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

Zinsser, William

27.

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

Rice, Anne

28.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

Sand, George

30.

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

Handke, Peter

31.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

34.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

35.

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

36.

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

Nicolson, Harold

37.

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

Raine, Craig

38.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

39.

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

40.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

41.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

42.

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

43.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

44.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

45.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

46.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

47.

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

48.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

49.

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

Pascal, Blaise

50.

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