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

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

Zinsser, William

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

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

Pound, Ezra

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

10.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

11.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

12.

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

13.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

14.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

15.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

16.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

17.

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

18.

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

Zinsser, William

19.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

21.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

22.

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

23.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

24.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

25.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

26.

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

27.

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

Dyer, Wayne

28.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

29.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

30.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

31.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

32.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

33.

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

Handke, Peter

34.

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

35.

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

Nicolson, Harold

36.

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

37.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

40.

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

Kesey, Ken

41.

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

Martin, Judith

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.

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

44.

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

Hutchens, John K.

45.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

46.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

47.

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

Forster, Edward M.

48.

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

Churchill, Charles

49.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

50.

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

Steinem, Gloria