Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

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

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Corbett, James J.

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

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

10.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

11.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

14.

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

Shaw, Irwin

15.

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

16.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

17.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

18.

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

19.

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

Miller, Olin

20.

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

21.

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

Bach, Richard

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

25.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

29.

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

Rosten, Leo

30.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

32.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

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.

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

James, William

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

37.

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

Joyce, James

38.

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

39.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

40.

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

Hutchens, John K.

41.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

42.

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

Doren, Carl Van

43.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

44.

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

45.

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

46.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

48.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

49.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.