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

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Forster, Edward M.

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

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

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

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

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

Joyce, James

10.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

11.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

12.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

Collins, Jackie

14.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

19.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

20.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

21.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

Trocchi, Alexander

25.

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

26.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

28.

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

Thurber, James

29.

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

30.

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

Byron, Lord

31.

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

32.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

33.

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

34.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

38.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

39.

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

40.

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

Faulkner, William

41.

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

42.

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

Rushdie, Salman

43.

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

Hazlitt, William

44.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

45.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

46.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

47.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

48.

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

49.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

50.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don