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

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Ellman, Lucy

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

11.

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

Canetti, Elias

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

15.

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

16.

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

Russell, Bertrand

17.

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

Forster, Edward M.

18.

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

Vries, Peter De

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

21.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

22.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

23.

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

Benchley, Robert

24.

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

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

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

Porter, Cole

27.

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

Marquis, Don

28.

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

Zinsser, William

29.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

30.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

31.

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

32.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

33.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

34.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

35.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

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

Steinbeck, John

38.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

39.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

40.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

41.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

42.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

43.

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

Orwell, George

44.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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.

46.

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

Steinem, Gloria

47.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

48.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

49.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

50.

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