Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Let's face it, writing is hell.

- Styron, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Rice, Anne

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

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

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

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

10.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

11.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

12.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

13.

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

14.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

15.

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

Martin, Judith

16.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

17.

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

Forster, Edward M.

18.

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

Corbett, James J.

19.

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

Rushdie, Salman

20.

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

21.

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

Vries, Peter De

22.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

24.

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

25.

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

Rosten, Leo

26.

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

Sand, George

27.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

28.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

29.

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

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

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

Collins, Jackie

32.

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

Mortimer, John

33.

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

34.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

35.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

38.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

39.

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

40.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

41.

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.

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

43.

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

Anderson, Margaret

44.

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

45.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

46.

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

Dyer, Wayne

47.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

48.

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

49.

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

Ellman, Lucy

50.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John