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

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

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.

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

10.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

Forster, Edward M.

12.

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

13.

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

Steinem, Gloria

14.

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

15.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Sand, George

19.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

22.

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

Swift, Jonathan

23.

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

Kesey, Ken

24.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

25.

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

Shaw, Irwin

26.

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

27.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

28.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

29.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

30.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

31.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

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

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

35.

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

36.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

37.

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

Hellman, Lillian

38.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

39.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

40.

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

41.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

49.

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

Thurber, James

50.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman