Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Smith, Dr. Walter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Asimov, Isaac

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

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

Dyer, Wayne

10.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

13.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

14.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

15.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

17.

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

Joyce, James

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

Rice, Anne

20.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

21.

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

22.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

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

Forster, Edward M.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

29.

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

Collins, Jackie

30.

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

31.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Zinsser, William

36.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

37.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

39.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

40.

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

Rushdie, Salman

41.

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

42.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

43.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

44.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

45.

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

Sand, George

46.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

47.

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

Russell, Bertrand

48.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

49.

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

Steinbeck, John

50.

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