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 writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Orwell, George

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

Marx, Groucho

10.

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

Liebling, A. J.

11.

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

Pascal, Blaise

12.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

13.

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

Gribbon, George

14.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

15.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

16.

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

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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

19.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

20.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

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

Rosten, Leo

24.

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

25.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

Collins, Jackie

28.

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

29.

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

Zinsser, William

30.

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

31.

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

Canetti, Elias

32.

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

33.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

35.

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.

36.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

37.

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

38.

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

Doren, Carl Van

39.

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

40.

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

Churchill, Charles

41.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

42.

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

43.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

44.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

45.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

48.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

49.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice