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

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

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

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

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Orwell, George

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

10.

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

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

13.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

14.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

15.

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

16.

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

Rushdie, Salman

17.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

22.

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

Freud, Sigmund

23.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

24.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

25.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

27.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

28.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

29.

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

Marquis, Don

30.

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

Bach, Richard

31.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

32.

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

Bennett, Arnold

33.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

34.

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

35.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

36.

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

37.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

38.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

39.

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

Pascal, Blaise

40.

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

Thurber, James

41.

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

Doren, Carl Van

42.

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

Collins, Jackie

43.

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

44.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

45.

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

46.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

47.

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

Joyce, James

48.

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

Faulkner, William

49.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

50.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George