Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Kesey, Ken

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Butler, Samuel

12.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

13.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

Sand, George

15.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

16.

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

Nunn, Gregory

17.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

18.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

19.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

20.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

21.

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

22.

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

Burgess, Anthony

23.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

27.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

31.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

32.

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

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.

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

35.

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

Hellman, Lillian

36.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

37.

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

38.

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

Zinsser, William

39.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

40.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

41.

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

42.

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

Porter, Cole

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

46.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

47.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

49.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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

Swift, Jonathan