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

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

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

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 writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

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

Ellman, Lucy

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

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

11.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

12.

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

Zinsser, William

13.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

14.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

15.

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

Thurber, James

16.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

17.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

18.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

19.

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

20.

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

Forster, Edward M.

21.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

22.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

24.

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

Swift, Jonathan

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

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

30.

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

Ferber, Edna

31.

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

32.

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

Dennis, Patrick

33.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

35.

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

Russell, Bertrand

36.

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

Steinem, Gloria

37.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

38.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

39.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

41.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

42.

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

Shaw, Irwin

43.

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

James, William

44.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

45.

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

Kesey, Ken

46.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

48.

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

49.

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

Joyce, James

50.

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

Faulkner, William