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 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

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

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

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

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

Murdoch, Iris

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

11.

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

Hutchens, John K.

12.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

13.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

14.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

15.

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

Nicolson, Harold

16.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

17.

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

Sontag, Susan

18.

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

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

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

21.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

22.

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

Rosten, Leo

23.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Steinem, Gloria

27.

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

Steinbeck, John

28.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

29.

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

30.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

31.

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

Marquis, Don

32.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

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

Orwell, George

35.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

36.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

37.

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

38.

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

Faulkner, William

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

43.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

44.

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

Corbett, James J.

45.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

46.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

47.

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

Pascal, Blaise

48.

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

49.

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

Nunn, Gregory

50.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William