Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Vries, Peter De

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

Nicolson, Harold

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Asimov, Isaac

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

Marx, Groucho

10.

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

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

14.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

15.

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

Ferber, Edna

16.

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

Goodman, Ellen

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.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

19.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

23.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

24.

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

25.

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

26.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

30.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

31.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

32.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

33.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

34.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

35.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

38.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

39.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

40.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

42.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

44.

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

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

46.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

50.

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