Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

- Sollers, Philippe

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Pound, Ezra

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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 responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

10.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

11.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

12.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

13.

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

Corbett, James J.

14.

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

15.

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

Liebling, A. J.

16.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

17.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

22.

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

23.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

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.

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

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Shaw, Irwin

31.

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

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

34.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

35.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

36.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

37.

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

38.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

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

42.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

43.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

46.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

47.

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

Rushdie, Salman

48.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

50.

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