Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Rushdie, Salman

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

Miller, Olin

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

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

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

Woolf, Virginia

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

10.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

11.

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

Steinem, Gloria

12.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

13.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

14.

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

Pound, Ezra

15.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

19.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

20.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

21.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

22.

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.

23.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

24.

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

Russell, Bertrand

25.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

26.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

27.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Steinbeck, John

29.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

30.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

31.

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

32.

Trocchi, Alexander

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

35.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

36.

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

37.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

38.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

39.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

40.

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

41.

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

Collins, Jackie

42.

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

43.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

44.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

45.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

47.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

48.

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

Steinbeck, John

49.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

50.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan