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

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

Handke, Peter

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Corbett, James J.

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

Dennis, Patrick

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

10.

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

11.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

12.

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.

13.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

15.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

Bennett, Arnold

19.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

20.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

21.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

22.

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

Porter, Cole

23.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

24.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

25.

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

26.

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

Nicolson, Harold

27.

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

28.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

30.

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

Sontag, Susan

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

34.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

35.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

36.

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

Zinsser, William

37.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

38.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

39.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

40.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

41.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

43.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

44.

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

Marx, Groucho

45.

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

46.

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

47.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

48.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

49.

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.

50.

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

Hutchens, John K.