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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

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

Steinbeck, John

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

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

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

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

Shaw, Irwin

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

Zinsser, William

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

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

11.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

12.

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

Thurber, James

13.

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

14.

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

Faulkner, William

15.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

17.

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

18.

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

19.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

20.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

21.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

22.

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

23.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

28.

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

29.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

30.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

31.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

32.

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

33.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

35.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

36.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

37.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

38.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

39.

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

Asimov, Isaac

40.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

41.

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.

42.

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

Forster, Edward M.

43.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

44.

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

45.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

46.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

47.

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

Murdoch, Iris

48.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

49.

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

Pound, Ezra

50.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George