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

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

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

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.

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

Porter, Cole

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

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

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

10.

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

Pascal, Blaise

11.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

12.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

13.

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

14.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Churchill, Charles

18.

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

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

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

Shaw, Irwin

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

24.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

25.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

26.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

27.

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

28.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

29.

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

Martin, Judith

30.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

31.

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

Faulkner, William

32.

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

Collins, Jackie

33.

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

34.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

35.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

36.

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

Orwell, George

37.

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

38.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

41.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

42.

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

Hutchens, John K.

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

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

46.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

47.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

48.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

49.

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

50.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman