Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

- Walker, Alice

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

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

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

Burgess, Anthony

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

Horace

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.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Swift, Jonathan

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

14.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

15.

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

16.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

19.

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

Joyce, James

20.

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

Freud, Sigmund

21.

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

Vries, Peter De

22.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

23.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

25.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

26.

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

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

Marquis, Don

28.

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

29.

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

Collins, Jackie

30.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

31.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

32.

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

33.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

34.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

35.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

36.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

37.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Rice, Anne

40.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

41.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

42.

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

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

45.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

46.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

47.

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

48.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

49.

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

50.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin