Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

- White, Elwyn Brooks

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Raine, Craig

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.

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

Byron, Lord

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

Butler, Samuel

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

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

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

Shaw, Irwin

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

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

11.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

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

Handke, Peter

14.

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

Pascal, Blaise

15.

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

16.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

17.

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

Steinem, Gloria

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

21.

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

22.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

23.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

24.

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

Zinsser, William

25.

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

Hutchens, John K.

26.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

27.

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

28.

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

Freud, Sigmund

29.

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

Gribbon, George

30.

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

Benchley, Robert

31.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

32.

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

33.

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

Sontag, Susan

34.

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

35.

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

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

37.

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

38.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

39.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

40.

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

Thurber, James

41.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

42.

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

Nunn, Gregory

43.

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

Porter, Cole

44.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

45.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

46.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

47.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

48.

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.

49.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

50.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward