Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

- Sontag, Susan

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Hemingway, Ernest

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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

Rushdie, Salman

10.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

11.

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

Nunn, Gregory

12.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

13.

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

14.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

15.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

16.

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.

17.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

Paz, Octavio

19.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

21.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

23.

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

Baldwin, James

24.

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

Vries, Peter De

25.

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

Zinsser, William

26.

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

27.

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

Zinsser, William

28.

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

Asimov, Isaac

29.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

30.

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

31.

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

Doren, Carl Van

32.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Gribbon, George

37.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

41.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

42.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

43.

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

44.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

46.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

47.

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

48.

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

Corbett, James J.

49.

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

50.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude