Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Woolf, Virginia

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

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.

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

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

10.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

11.

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

Dyer, Wayne

12.

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

13.

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

Horace

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

17.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

18.

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

19.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

20.

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

21.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

22.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

23.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

24.

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

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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

27.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

28.

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

29.

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

Johnson, Samuel

30.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

31.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

32.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

Rice, Anne

38.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

40.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

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

Rushdie, Salman

42.

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

Marquis, Don

43.

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

Orwell, George

44.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

45.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

46.

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

47.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

48.

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

Butler, Samuel

49.

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

Pound, Ezra

50.

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