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

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

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

Miller, Olin

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

10.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

11.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

12.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

13.

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

Zinsser, William

14.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

15.

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

16.

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

Freud, Sigmund

17.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

18.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

Hellman, Lillian

22.

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

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

25.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

26.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

27.

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

28.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

29.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

30.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

31.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

32.

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

Martin, Judith

33.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

34.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

35.

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

Shaw, Irwin

36.

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

Duncan, Isadora

37.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

38.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

40.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

41.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

42.

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

Horace

43.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

44.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

45.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

46.

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

Hutchens, John K.

47.

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

Goodman, Ellen

48.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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