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

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Lawrence, D. H.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

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

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

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

Burgess, Anthony

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

10.

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

Pascal, Blaise

11.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

12.

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

13.

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

Rushdie, Salman

14.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

15.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

16.

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

Orwell, George

17.

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

Ellman, Lucy

18.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

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

23.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

24.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

25.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

26.

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

Paz, Octavio

27.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

28.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

29.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

30.

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

31.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

32.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

33.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

34.

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

Butler, Samuel

35.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

36.

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

37.

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

38.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Bach, Richard

42.

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

43.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

45.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

46.

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

47.

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

Handke, Peter

48.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

49.

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

50.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.