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

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.

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

Hellman, Lillian

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

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

Woolf, Virginia

10.

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.

11.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

15.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

16.

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

17.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

18.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

19.

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

Rice, Anne

20.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

22.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

23.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

24.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

25.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

26.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

27.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

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

32.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

33.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

34.

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

35.

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

Churchill, Charles

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

Porter, Cole

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Woolf, Virginia

43.

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

Zinsser, William

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

48.

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

Kraus, Karl

49.

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

Paz, Octavio

50.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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