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

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 writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Nunn, Gregory

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

10.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

11.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

12.

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

13.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

14.

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

15.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

16.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

17.

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

Nicolson, Harold

18.

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

19.

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

Ferber, Edna

20.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

21.

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

Goodman, Ellen

22.

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

23.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

24.

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

Miller, Olin

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Swift, Jonathan

30.

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

Hellman, Lillian

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

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

Sontag, Susan

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

Shaw, Irwin

37.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

38.

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

Vries, Peter De

39.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

40.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

42.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

43.

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

44.

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

Martin, Judith

45.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

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

48.

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

Rushdie, Salman

49.

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.

50.

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

Rushdie, Salman