Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

- Vidal, Gore

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

10.

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

Duncan, Isadora

11.

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

12.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

13.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

14.

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

Steinbeck, John

15.

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

Bennett, Arnold

16.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

17.

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

Thurber, James

18.

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

Pascal, Blaise

19.

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

Zinsser, William

20.

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

Anderson, Margaret

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Dennis, Patrick

24.

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

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

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

Freud, Sigmund

28.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

29.

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

Ferber, Edna

30.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

31.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

32.

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

33.

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

Raine, Craig

34.

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

35.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

36.

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

Porter, Cole

37.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

38.

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

Marx, Groucho

39.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

40.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

41.

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

42.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

43.

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

44.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

45.

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

46.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

47.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

48.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

49.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

50.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.