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

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Fadiman, Clifton

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Kesey, Ken

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

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

11.

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

Martin, Judith

12.

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

Miller, Olin

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

16.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

17.

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

Swift, Jonathan

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

21.

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

Thurber, James

22.

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

Murdoch, Iris

23.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

24.

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.

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

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.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

30.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

31.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

32.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. 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.

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

35.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

Hazlitt, William

37.

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

Forster, Edward M.

38.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

39.

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

Doren, Carl Van

40.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

41.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

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.

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.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

46.

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

47.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

50.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita