Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

- Thurber, James

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

Dennis, Patrick

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

Twain, Mark

10.

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

Mortimer, John

11.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

12.

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

13.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

15.

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

16.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

17.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

18.

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

Handke, Peter

19.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

20.

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

21.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

22.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

Nunn, Gregory

24.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

25.

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

26.

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

Thurber, James

27.

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.

28.

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

Ferber, Edna

29.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

Forster, Edward M.

31.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

32.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

33.

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

Byron, Lord

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

37.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

41.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

42.

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

43.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

44.

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

Benchley, Robert

45.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

47.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

48.

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

49.

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

Russell, Bertrand

50.

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