Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

- Wheeler, Bill

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Kesey, Ken

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

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

Anderson, Margaret

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

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

Paz, Octavio

10.

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

Vries, Peter De

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

13.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

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.

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

Nunn, Gregory

21.

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

22.

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

Sand, George

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

27.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

28.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

29.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

30.

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

Zinsser, William

31.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

32.

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

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.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

Rice, Anne

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.

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.

40.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

41.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

42.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

43.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

45.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

46.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

Hutchens, John K.

48.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

49.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

50.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.