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

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

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

Paz, Octavio

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

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

10.

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

11.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

12.

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

13.

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

Zinsser, William

14.

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

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

17.

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

18.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

19.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

20.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

21.

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

Marx, Groucho

22.

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

Ellman, Lucy

23.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

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

Benchley, Robert

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

29.

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

30.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

31.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

32.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

33.

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

34.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

35.

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

Faulkner, William

36.

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

37.

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

Rushdie, Salman

38.

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

39.

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

Steinem, Gloria

40.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

41.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

42.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

45.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

Benchley, Robert

49.

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

50.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset