Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

- Wheeler, Bill

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

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

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

Horace

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Sontag, Susan

10.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

11.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

14.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

15.

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

16.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

18.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

19.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

20.

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.

21.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

22.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

23.

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

Asimov, Isaac

24.

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

Anderson, Margaret

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

27.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

28.

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.

29.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

30.

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

Vries, Peter De

31.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

32.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

33.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

34.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

39.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

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

42.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Ferber, Edna

46.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

47.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

48.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

49.

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

50.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John