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

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

Zinsser, William

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

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

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

Faulkner, William

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

10.

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

Pascal, Blaise

11.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

12.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

13.

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

Duncan, Isadora

14.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

15.

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

Butler, Samuel

16.

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

17.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Russell, Bertrand

21.

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

22.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

23.

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

24.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

25.

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

26.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Churchill, Charles

28.

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

Bach, Richard

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

Martin, Judith

31.

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

Ferber, Edna

32.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

33.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

34.

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

35.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

36.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

38.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

39.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

40.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

41.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

42.

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

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

45.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

46.

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

Freud, Sigmund

47.

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

Bennett, Arnold

48.

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

Marquis, Don

49.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.