Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

- Wheeler, Bill

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Bennett, Arnold

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

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

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

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

10.

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.

11.

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

Hellman, Lillian

12.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

13.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

14.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

15.

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

Hellman, Lillian

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Anderson, Margaret

21.

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.

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

24.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

25.

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

Rosten, Leo

26.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

27.

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

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

31.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

32.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

33.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

34.

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

35.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

36.

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

37.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

38.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

39.

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

40.

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

Steinbeck, John

41.

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

Dennis, Patrick

42.

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

Corbett, James J.

43.

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

Hutchens, John K.

44.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

46.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

47.

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

48.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

49.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

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.