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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Hemingway, Ernest

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

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

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

10.

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

11.

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

12.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

14.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

19.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

20.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

21.

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

22.

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

Ferber, Edna

23.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

24.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

25.

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

26.

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

Rosten, Leo

27.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

28.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

29.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

32.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

33.

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

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

36.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

37.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

38.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

39.

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

40.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

41.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

42.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

43.

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

44.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

45.

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

Collins, Jackie

46.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

47.

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

48.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

49.

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

50.

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

Porter, Cole