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 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

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

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.

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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

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

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.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

13.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

14.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

15.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

16.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

17.

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

Benchley, Robert

18.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

19.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

20.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

21.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

22.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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.

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

Baldwin, James

25.

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

26.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Collins, Jackie

28.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Churchill, Charles

32.

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

33.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

34.

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

Liebling, A. J.

35.

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.

36.

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

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

Hutchens, John K.

38.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

39.

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.

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

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

Porter, Cole

45.

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

Ellman, Lucy

46.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

47.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

48.

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

49.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

50.

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

Marquis, Don