Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Steinbeck, John

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Miller, Olin

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

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

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Nicolson, Harold

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

10.

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

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

Dyer, Wayne

13.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

14.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

15.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

16.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

17.

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

Ellman, Lucy

18.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

19.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

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

21.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Bennett, Arnold

23.

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

24.

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

25.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

26.

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

27.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

28.

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

Raine, Craig

29.

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

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

32.

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

Byron, Lord

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

35.

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

36.

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

37.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

38.

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

39.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

40.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

41.

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

Churchill, Charles

42.

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

43.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

44.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

45.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

46.

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

47.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

48.

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

Hazlitt, William

49.

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

50.

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