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

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

Anderson, Margaret

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Ellman, Lucy

10.

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

11.

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

Rosten, Leo

12.

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

Faulkner, William

13.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

14.

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

15.

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

Zinsser, William

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

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.

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

21.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

23.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

24.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

29.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

31.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

32.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

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

Hellman, Lillian

37.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

38.

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

Dennis, Patrick

39.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

40.

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

Burgess, Anthony

41.

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

42.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

43.

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

Duncan, Isadora

44.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

45.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

46.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

47.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

48.

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

49.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

50.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice