Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

- Sollers, Philippe

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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.

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

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

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

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

10.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Thurber, James

13.

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

14.

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

Canetti, Elias

15.

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

Gribbon, George

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Orwell, George

19.

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

Zinsser, William

20.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

21.

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

Steinbeck, John

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

Rushdie, Salman

24.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

25.

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

Baldwin, James

26.

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

27.

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

Steinbeck, John

28.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

29.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

30.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

31.

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

32.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

33.

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

34.

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

Kesey, Ken

35.

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

36.

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

Anderson, Margaret

37.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

38.

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

39.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

40.

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

Murdoch, Iris

41.

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

Doren, Carl Van

42.

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

43.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

44.

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

Corbett, James J.

45.

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

Marx, Groucho

46.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

47.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

48.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

49.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril