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

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

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

Fadiman, Clifton

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Zinsser, William

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.

10.

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

Johnson, Samuel

11.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

12.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

13.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

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.

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

Steinbeck, John

16.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

17.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Collins, Jackie

20.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

21.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

22.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

24.

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

Orwell, George

25.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

26.

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

27.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

28.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

29.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

32.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

33.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

34.

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

35.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

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

Bennett, Arnold

37.

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

38.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

39.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

40.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

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

Murdoch, Iris

42.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

43.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

44.

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

45.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

46.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

47.

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

48.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

49.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

50.

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

Ferber, Edna