Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

10.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

Butler, Samuel

14.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

15.

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

Freud, Sigmund

16.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Porter, Cole

20.

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

Hellman, Lillian

21.

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

Benchley, Robert

22.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

23.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

24.

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

25.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Zinsser, William

29.

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

Rice, Anne

30.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

31.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

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

37.

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

Horace

38.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

39.

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

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

48.

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

Rushdie, Salman

49.

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

Johnson, Samuel

50.

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