Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Steinem, Gloria

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

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

Baldwin, James

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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

Ellman, Lucy

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Zinsser, William

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

Fadiman, Clifton

10.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

13.

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

14.

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

15.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

19.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

20.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

Sand, George

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

27.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

28.

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

29.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

30.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

31.

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

Corbett, James J.

32.

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

Zinsser, William

33.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

34.

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

Handke, Peter

35.

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

Steinem, Gloria

36.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

41.

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

42.

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

43.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

44.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

45.

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

Forster, Edward M.

46.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

49.

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

50.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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