Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Vorse, Mary Heaton

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

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

Steinem, Gloria

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

10.

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

James, William

11.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

13.

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

Rosten, Leo

14.

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

Twain, Mark

15.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

18.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

19.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

20.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

22.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

24.

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

Orwell, George

25.

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

Duncan, Isadora

26.

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

27.

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

Vries, Peter De

28.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

Corbett, James J.

35.

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

Hellman, Lillian

36.

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

37.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

38.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

Porter, Cole

40.

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.

41.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

42.

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

Raine, Craig

43.

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

Doren, Carl Van

44.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

45.

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

46.

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

47.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton