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

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.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

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

Ellman, Lucy

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Naipaul, V. S.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

10.

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

Corbett, James J.

11.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

12.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

13.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

14.

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.

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

17.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

18.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

21.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

22.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

23.

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.

24.

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

Rushdie, Salman

25.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

26.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

27.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

28.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

29.

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

30.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

31.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

32.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

33.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

34.

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

Vries, Peter De

35.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

39.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

40.

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

Benchley, Robert

41.

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

Pound, Ezra

42.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

Hazlitt, William

44.

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

45.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

47.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

48.

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

Canetti, Elias

49.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

50.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise