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

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.

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

Anderson, Margaret

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

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

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

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Lawrence, D. H.

10.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

11.

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

12.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

13.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

14.

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

Pound, Ezra

15.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

16.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

17.

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

18.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

19.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

20.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

21.

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

22.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

23.

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

24.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

25.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

26.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

27.

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

Dennis, Patrick

28.

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.

29.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

30.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

31.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

32.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

33.

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

Russell, Bertrand

34.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

38.

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

Hazlitt, William

39.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

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.

42.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

43.

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

44.

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

Asimov, Isaac

45.

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

Johnson, Samuel

46.

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

47.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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

Liebling, A. J.

50.

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