Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Freud, Sigmund

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

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

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Rice, Anne

10.

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

Miller, Olin

11.

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

12.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

15.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

18.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

19.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

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

Ferber, Edna

25.

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

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

28.

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.

29.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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.

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

Marx, Groucho

32.

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

Sontag, Susan

33.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

34.

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.

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

38.

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

Doren, Carl Van

39.

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

Dennis, Patrick

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

42.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

43.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

44.

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

Collins, Jackie

45.

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

Bach, Richard

46.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

47.

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.

48.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

49.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

50.

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