Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

- Walker, Alice

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

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

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

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

Bach, Richard

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

10.

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

11.

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

Zinsser, William

12.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Burgess, Anthony

16.

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

Rice, Anne

17.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

18.

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

19.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

24.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

27.

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

28.

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

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Nunn, Gregory

35.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

36.

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.

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

39.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

40.

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

41.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

42.

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

Sontag, Susan

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

47.

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

Thurber, James

48.

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