Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

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

11.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

12.

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

13.

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

Handke, Peter

14.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

15.

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

Zinsser, William

16.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

17.

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

18.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

19.

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

Miller, Olin

20.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Paz, Octavio

24.

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

Zinsser, William

25.

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

Murdoch, Iris

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.

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

Bennett, Arnold

28.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

29.

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

Marx, Groucho

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

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

32.

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

33.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

34.

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

35.

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

Vries, Peter De

36.

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

Rice, Anne

37.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Dennis, Patrick

44.

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

Baldwin, James

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

48.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

49.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

50.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.