Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Corbett, James J.

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.

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Landor, Walter Savage

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

10.

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

Dyer, Wayne

11.

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

Paz, Octavio

12.

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

13.

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

Butler, Samuel

14.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

15.

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

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

18.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

19.

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

Bennett, Arnold

20.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

21.

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

Rushdie, Salman

22.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

23.

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

24.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

25.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

28.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

29.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

30.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

31.

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

32.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

33.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

34.

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

35.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

36.

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

Doren, Carl Van

37.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

39.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

40.

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

41.

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

Faulkner, William

42.

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

43.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

44.

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.

45.

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

Zinsser, William

46.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

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

Hellman, Lillian

48.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

49.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.