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 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

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

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

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

Liebling, A. J.

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 not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

10.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

11.

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

Dyer, Wayne

12.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

13.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

14.

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

Rice, Anne

15.

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

16.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

17.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

18.

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

Swift, Jonathan

19.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

20.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

21.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

23.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

28.

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

29.

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

Ellman, Lucy

30.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

31.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

32.

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

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

35.

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

36.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

37.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

38.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

39.

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

40.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

41.

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

42.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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

Nunn, Gregory

48.

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

Bach, Richard

49.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

50.

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