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

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

Rice, Anne

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

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

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.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

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

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

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

Bach, Richard

10.

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

Martin, Judith

11.

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

Gribbon, George

12.

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

13.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

14.

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

15.

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

Asimov, Isaac

16.

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

17.

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

18.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

19.

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

Duncan, Isadora

20.

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

21.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

22.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

23.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

24.

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

Benchley, Robert

25.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

26.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

27.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

28.

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

Zinsser, William

29.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

30.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

35.

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

36.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

37.

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

38.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

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

Shaw, Irwin

41.

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

Benchley, Robert

42.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

44.

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

45.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

46.

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

Kesey, Ken

47.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.