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

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 you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

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

Mortimer, John

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

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

Marx, Groucho

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

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.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

11.

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

Collins, Jackie

12.

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

Forster, Edward M.

13.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

15.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

James, William

21.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

22.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

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

Martin, Judith

25.

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

26.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

29.

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

Raine, Craig

30.

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

31.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

32.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

33.

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

Kesey, Ken

34.

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

Johnson, Samuel

35.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

36.

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

Benchley, Robert

37.

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

38.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

39.

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

40.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

41.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

44.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

45.

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

Steinem, Gloria

46.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Paz, Octavio