Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Smith, Nancy Banks

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

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

Ellman, Lucy

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Zinsser, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

15.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

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

Marquis, Don

17.

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

18.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

19.

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

Collins, Jackie

20.

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

Benchley, Robert

21.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

22.

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

Rosten, Leo

23.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Zinsser, William

27.

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

Anderson, Margaret

28.

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

29.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

30.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

31.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

32.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

33.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

34.

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

35.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

Bennett, Arnold

37.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

39.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

40.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

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

Bach, Richard

42.

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

Shaw, Irwin

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

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

Freud, Sigmund

47.

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

48.

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

Faulkner, William

49.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

50.

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

Doren, Carl Van