Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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.

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

Orwell, George

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

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

Burgess, Anthony

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

10.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

15.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

16.

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

17.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

18.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

19.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

Forster, Edward M.

21.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

22.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

23.

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

24.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

29.

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

30.

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

Duncan, Isadora

31.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

32.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

33.

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

34.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

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

Steinbeck, John

36.

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

37.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

39.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

40.

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

Marx, Groucho

41.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

42.

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

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

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

45.

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

Collins, Jackie

46.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

47.

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

48.

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

Mencken, H. L.

49.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

50.

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

Faulkner, William