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

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

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

Paz, Octavio

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

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

Marx, Groucho

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

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

12.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

13.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

14.

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

Canetti, Elias

15.

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.

16.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

17.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

19.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

21.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

22.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

23.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

24.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

25.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

26.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

27.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

28.

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

Steinem, Gloria

29.

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

Faulkner, William

30.

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

31.

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

Collins, Jackie

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

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

Corbett, James J.

34.

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

Dyer, Wayne

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

38.

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

Orwell, George

39.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

42.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

43.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

44.

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

Zinsser, William

45.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Churchill, Charles