Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

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

Benchley, Robert

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Churchill, Charles

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

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

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

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

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

Mortimer, John

10.

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

James, William

11.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

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.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

14.

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

15.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

16.

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

Liebling, A. J.

17.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

18.

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

19.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

20.

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

Paz, Octavio

21.

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

22.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

23.

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

Porter, Cole

24.

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

Forster, Edward M.

25.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

26.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

32.

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.

33.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

34.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

35.

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

Duncan, Isadora

36.

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

37.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

38.

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

Sontag, Susan

39.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

40.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

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.

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

Marx, Groucho

44.

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

Asimov, Isaac

45.

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

Thurber, James

46.

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

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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

Rice, Anne

49.

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

50.

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