Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

- Wheeler, Bill

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Sand, George

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

Marquis, Don

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

Butler, Samuel

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Freud, Sigmund

14.

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

Handke, Peter

15.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

16.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

17.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

22.

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

Duncan, Isadora

23.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

24.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

25.

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

Mortimer, John

26.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

27.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

28.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

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.

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

Porter, Cole

35.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

36.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

37.

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

38.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

39.

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

40.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

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

Kesey, Ken

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

45.

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

46.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

47.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

48.

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

Zinsser, William

49.

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

Thurber, James

50.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.