Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Nicolson, Harold

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

Swift, Jonathan

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

10.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

11.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

12.

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

13.

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

Murdoch, Iris

14.

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

Marquis, Don

15.

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

Joyce, James

16.

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

Faulkner, William

17.

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

Anderson, Margaret

18.

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

Gribbon, George

19.

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

20.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

21.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

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.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

24.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

25.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

26.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

27.

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

Zinsser, William

28.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

29.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

30.

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

31.

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

Nunn, Gregory

32.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Faulkner, William

41.

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

42.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

45.

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

Sontag, Susan

46.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

47.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

49.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

50.

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

Martin, Judith