Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Swift, Jonathan

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

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

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Marquis, Don

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

Raine, Craig

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.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

10.

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

Steinbeck, John

11.

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

12.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

13.

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

Twain, Mark

14.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

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 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

17.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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

Kesey, Ken

21.

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

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

25.

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

26.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

27.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

28.

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

29.

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

Ellman, Lucy

30.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

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

Faulkner, William

32.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

33.

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

34.

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

Swift, Jonathan

35.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

36.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

37.

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

Rushdie, Salman

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

41.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

42.

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

Anderson, Margaret

43.

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

44.

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

Martin, Judith

45.

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

Rosten, Leo

46.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

47.

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

Pascal, Blaise

48.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

49.

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

Benchley, Robert

50.

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

Hutchens, John K.