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

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Zinsser, William

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

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

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

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.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

10.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

11.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

12.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

13.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

14.

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

Faulkner, William

15.

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.

16.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

17.

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

Canetti, Elias

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

22.

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

Dennis, Patrick

23.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

24.

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

Nunn, Gregory

25.

Stone, Robert

26.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

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.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Sontag, Susan

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Corbett, James J.

35.

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

Zinsser, William

36.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

37.

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

38.

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

Rushdie, Salman

39.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

40.

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

Anderson, Margaret

41.

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

42.

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

Freud, Sigmund

43.

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

Benchley, Robert

44.

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

45.

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

Butler, Samuel

46.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

47.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

48.

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.