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

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

Canetti, Elias

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

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

Steinbeck, John

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.

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

Zinsser, William

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

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.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

11.

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

Faulkner, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Corbett, James J.

15.

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

16.

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

Miller, Olin

17.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

18.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

20.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

21.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

22.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

23.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

24.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

25.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

27.

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

Faulkner, William

28.

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

29.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

30.

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

Dyer, Wayne

31.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

32.

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

Baldwin, James

33.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

34.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

35.

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

Rice, Anne

36.

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

Freud, Sigmund

37.

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

Dennis, Patrick

38.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

42.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

43.

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

Anderson, Margaret

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

48.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

49.

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

50.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.