Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

Vries, Peter De

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

11.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

15.

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

16.

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

Hazlitt, William

17.

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

18.

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

Churchill, Charles

19.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

20.

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

Anderson, Margaret

21.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

22.

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

Swift, Jonathan

23.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

24.

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

25.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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.

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

32.

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

Dyer, Wayne

33.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

34.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

35.

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

Corbett, James J.

36.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

37.

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

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.

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

Faulkner, William

40.

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

Ellman, Lucy

41.

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

Bach, Richard

42.

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

43.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

44.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

45.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

46.

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

Shaw, Irwin

47.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

48.

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

49.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

50.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.