Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Steinbeck, John

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Handke, Peter

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

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

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

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

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

Duncan, Isadora

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

10.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

11.

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

12.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

14.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

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

Forster, Edward M.

18.

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

19.

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

Zinsser, William

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Hellman, Lillian

23.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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.

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

28.

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

29.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

30.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

31.

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

32.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

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.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

35.

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

Hutchens, John K.

36.

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

37.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

38.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

39.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

40.

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

Zinsser, William

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

43.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

44.

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

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.

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

47.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

48.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

Goodman, Ellen

50.

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