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

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

James, William

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

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

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.

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

10.

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

11.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

12.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

14.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

19.

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

20.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

21.

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

Orwell, George

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.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

24.

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

Vries, Peter De

25.

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

26.

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

Martin, Judith

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

30.

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

31.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

32.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

33.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

34.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

38.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

39.

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

Thurber, James

40.

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

Nicolson, Harold

41.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

45.

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

Gribbon, George

46.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

47.

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

48.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

49.

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

Kesey, Ken

50.

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