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

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

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

Nicolson, Harold

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

James, William

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

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

10.

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

11.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

12.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Dyer, Wayne

14.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

15.

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

16.

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

Murdoch, Iris

17.

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

Vries, Peter De

18.

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

Pascal, Blaise

19.

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

Churchill, Charles

20.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

Collins, Jackie

22.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

23.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

24.

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

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

28.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

29.

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

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

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

Marx, Groucho

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

Rosten, Leo

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

37.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

40.

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

41.

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

Ferber, Edna

42.

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

Ellman, Lucy

43.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

44.

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

Hazlitt, William

45.

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

Thurber, James

46.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

47.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Faulkner, William