Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Swift, Jonathan

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

Raine, Craig

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

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

Steinem, Gloria

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

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

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

11.

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

Kraus, Karl

12.

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

Sontag, Susan

13.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

15.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

16.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Rushdie, Salman

20.

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.

21.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

22.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

23.

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

Rice, Anne

24.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

28.

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

Freud, Sigmund

29.

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

Hellman, Lillian

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

33.

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.

34.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

35.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

36.

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

37.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

38.

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

39.

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

Nunn, Gregory

40.

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

Handke, Peter

41.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

42.

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

43.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

44.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

45.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

48.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

49.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

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