Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Thurber, James

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

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

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

Steinbeck, John

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

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

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

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

Byron, Lord

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

Horace

16.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

17.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

18.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

19.

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

Rosten, Leo

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

24.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

25.

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

26.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

27.

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

28.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

29.

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

Dennis, Patrick

30.

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

31.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

34.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

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

Faulkner, William

36.

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

Rushdie, Salman

37.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

38.

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

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

Martin, Judith

41.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

42.

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

Ellman, Lucy

43.

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

44.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

45.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

46.

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

Baldwin, James

47.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

48.

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