Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Nicolson, Harold

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

Duncan, Isadora

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

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

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

10.

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

11.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

18.

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

Butler, Samuel

19.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

20.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

21.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

22.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

23.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

24.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

25.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

26.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

27.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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

29.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

30.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

31.

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

Ferber, Edna

32.

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

Mortimer, John

33.

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

Handke, Peter

34.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

36.

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

37.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

Sontag, Susan

39.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

41.

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

42.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

43.

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

44.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

48.

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

49.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

50.

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

Woolf, Virginia