Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

- Smith, Logan Pearsall

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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.

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

Rosten, Leo

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

Collins, Jackie

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

Dyer, Wayne

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

10.

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

11.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

12.

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

13.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

14.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

15.

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

16.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

17.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

18.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

19.

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

Asimov, Isaac

20.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

26.

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

Miller, Olin

27.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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.

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

Vries, Peter De

30.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

31.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

32.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

33.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

35.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Bach, Richard

42.

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

Gribbon, George

43.

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

Ellman, Lucy

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

48.

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

Steinem, Gloria

49.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.