Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

Dennis, Patrick

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

10.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

12.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

13.

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

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

16.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

17.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

18.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

19.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

20.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

21.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

22.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

23.

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

Hellman, Lillian

24.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

25.

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

26.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

27.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

28.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Russell, Bertrand

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Marquis, Don

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

39.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

Ferber, Edna

43.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

44.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

45.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

46.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

47.

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

Kesey, Ken

48.

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

Martin, Judith

49.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

50.

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

Handke, Peter