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

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

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Pascal, Blaise

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

10.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

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

15.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

16.

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

Faulkner, William

17.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

18.

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

19.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

20.

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

Nunn, Gregory

21.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

22.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

25.

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

Thurber, James

26.

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.

27.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

33.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

34.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

35.

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.

36.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

37.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

38.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

39.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

40.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

41.

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

Doren, Carl Van

42.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

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

Marquis, Don

45.

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

Martin, Judith

46.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

47.

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

Hazlitt, William

48.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

49.

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

50.

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

Wilde, Oscar