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

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

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

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Byron, Lord

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

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

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

Burgess, Anthony

10.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

Rice, Anne

12.

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

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

15.

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

Mencken, H. L.

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

22.

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

23.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

Porter, Cole

27.

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

Hellman, Lillian

28.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

29.

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

Nunn, Gregory

30.

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

Butler, Samuel

31.

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

32.

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

Zinsser, William

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Orwell, George

36.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

37.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

38.

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

39.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

40.

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

41.

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

Liebling, A. J.

42.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

44.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

45.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

46.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

47.

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

48.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

49.

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

50.

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

Naipaul, V. S.