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

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

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

Woolf, Virginia

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

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

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

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

Nunn, Gregory

11.

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

Anderson, Margaret

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

14.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

15.

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

16.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

17.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

20.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

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

Asimov, Isaac

25.

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

Steinbeck, John

26.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

28.

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

29.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

30.

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

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

33.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

34.

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

35.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

36.

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

Ellman, Lucy

37.

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

Vries, Peter De

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.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

40.

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

41.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

43.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

44.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.