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

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Ellman, Lucy

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

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

Martin, Judith

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

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

10.

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

11.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

12.

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

13.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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.

16.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

17.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

21.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

22.

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

Freud, Sigmund

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

Byron, Lord

25.

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

26.

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

Murdoch, Iris

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.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

29.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

30.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

31.

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

32.

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

Marx, Groucho

33.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

34.

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

Thurber, James

35.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

37.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

38.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

39.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

44.

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

Anderson, Margaret

45.

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

Joyce, James

46.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

48.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

49.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

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

Hemingway, Ernest