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

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

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

10.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

13.

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

Raine, Craig

14.

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

15.

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

Forster, Edward M.

16.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

17.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

18.

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

Nunn, Gregory

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Woolf, Virginia

25.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

26.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

27.

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

28.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

29.

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

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

32.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

33.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

34.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

35.

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

36.

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

Zinsser, William

37.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

38.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

40.

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

Zinsser, William

41.

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.

42.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

43.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

44.

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

45.

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

Kesey, Ken

46.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

Bach, Richard

49.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

50.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William