Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

- Vizinczey, Stephen

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

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

Bennett, Arnold

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

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

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

Orwell, George

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

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

12.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

13.

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

14.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

15.

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

Steinem, Gloria

16.

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

17.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

18.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

19.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

20.

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

21.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

22.

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

23.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Porter, Cole

27.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

29.

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

30.

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

Hutchens, John K.

31.

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

Asimov, Isaac

32.

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

33.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

34.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

36.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

37.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

38.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

39.

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

Kesey, Ken

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

42.

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

43.

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

Mortimer, John

44.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

45.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

46.

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

Kraus, Karl

47.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

48.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

49.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

50.

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

Swift, Jonathan