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

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

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

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

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

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Kesey, Ken

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

10.

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

11.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

13.

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

14.

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

Marx, Groucho

15.

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

16.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

17.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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

20.

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

Ferber, Edna

21.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

26.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

30.

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

31.

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

Baldwin, James

32.

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

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

Hellman, Lillian

34.

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

Rice, Anne

35.

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

36.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

37.

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

38.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

39.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

40.

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

Swift, Jonathan

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

43.

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

44.

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

Canetti, Elias

45.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

47.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

48.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

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 is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin