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

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

Nicolson, Harold

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

Doren, Carl Van

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

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

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

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

10.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

12.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

13.

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

Shaw, Irwin

14.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Anderson, Margaret

20.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

21.

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

Steinbeck, John

22.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

23.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

24.

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

Baldwin, James

25.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

26.

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

27.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

28.

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

Ellman, Lucy

29.

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

Forster, Edward M.

30.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Rushdie, Salman

37.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

38.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

39.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

Raine, Craig

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Porter, Cole

44.

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

Canetti, Elias

45.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

47.

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

Faulkner, William

48.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

49.

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

50.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman