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

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

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

Dahlberg, Edward

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

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

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

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

12.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

14.

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

15.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

16.

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

17.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

18.

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

Russell, Bertrand

19.

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

20.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

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.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

30.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

35.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

36.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

37.

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

38.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

39.

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

Zinsser, William

40.

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

41.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

42.

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

43.

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

Dennis, Patrick

44.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

45.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

46.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

47.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

49.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

50.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.