Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

- Walker, Alice

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

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

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

Baldwin, James

10.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

11.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

12.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

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

15.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

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

Thurber, James

17.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

18.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

19.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

21.

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

22.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

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

Horace

24.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

25.

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

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.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

28.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

29.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

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.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

34.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

35.

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.

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

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

38.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

39.

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

Asimov, Isaac

40.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

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

Hellman, Lillian

42.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

43.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

44.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

45.

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

46.

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

47.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

48.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

49.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

50.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John