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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

Marquis, Don

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

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

Ferber, Edna

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

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

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

12.

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

Dennis, Patrick

13.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

14.

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

15.

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

Steinbeck, John

16.

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

Hazlitt, William

17.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

18.

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

19.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

20.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

24.

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

25.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

26.

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

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

Rosten, Leo

28.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

29.

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

Horace

30.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

34.

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.

35.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

36.

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

Handke, Peter

37.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

40.

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

41.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

42.

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

Johnson, Samuel

43.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

46.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

47.

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

48.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

49.

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

Kraus, Karl

50.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John