Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

- Wheeler, Bill

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Freud, Sigmund

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Baldwin, James

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

Auden, W. H.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

14.

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

15.

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

Steinem, Gloria

16.

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

Martin, Judith

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

Thurber, James

22.

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

23.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

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.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

26.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

30.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

31.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

32.

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.

33.

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

Nicolson, Harold

34.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

35.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

36.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

41.

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

Steinbeck, John

42.

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

43.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

44.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

46.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

47.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Ferber, Edna