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

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

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

Benchley, Robert

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Naipaul, V. S.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Hellman, Lillian

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

14.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

15.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

16.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

17.

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

18.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

19.

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

20.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

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

26.

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

Anderson, Margaret

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

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

Nunn, Gregory

29.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

30.

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

31.

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

Woolf, Virginia

32.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

33.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

34.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

35.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

36.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

37.

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

Kraus, Karl

38.

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

39.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

40.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

41.

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

42.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

43.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

44.

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.

45.

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

Ellman, Lucy

46.

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

47.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Forster, Edward M.