Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Rice, Anne

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

Dennis, Patrick

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

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

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

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

Doren, Carl Van

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Vries, Peter De

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

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

19.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

20.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

21.

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

22.

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

Goodman, Ellen

23.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

24.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

25.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

26.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

33.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

34.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

35.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

36.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

37.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

39.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

43.

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

Marx, Groucho

44.

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

45.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

46.

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

47.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

48.

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

49.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

50.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.