Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

- Sontag, Susan

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Collins, Jackie

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

10.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

11.

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

12.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

13.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

14.

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

Vries, Peter De

15.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

16.

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

Baldwin, James

17.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

19.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

20.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

21.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

22.

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.

23.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

24.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

25.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

26.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

27.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

28.

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

29.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

31.

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

Benchley, Robert

32.

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

33.

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

Zinsser, William

34.

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

35.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

36.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

37.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

38.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

39.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Bennett, Arnold

41.

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

42.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

43.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

44.

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

45.

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

Faulkner, William

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

48.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

49.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

50.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.