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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

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

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

Handke, Peter

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

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

Rice, Anne

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

Benchley, Robert

10.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

12.

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

Woolf, Virginia

13.

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.

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.

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

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

18.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

Butler, Samuel

21.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

22.

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

23.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

24.

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

25.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

26.

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

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

30.

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

Kesey, Ken

31.

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

Hellman, Lillian

32.

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

33.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

34.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

35.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

36.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

37.

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

38.

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

Byron, Lord

39.

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

Benchley, Robert

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

43.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

44.

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

45.

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

Marx, Groucho

46.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

47.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

48.

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

49.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

50.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander