Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- White, Elwyn Brooks

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Handke, Peter

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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.

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

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

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

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

10.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

11.

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

Hutchens, John K.

12.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

13.

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

Byron, Lord

14.

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

15.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

16.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

17.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

18.

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

19.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

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

Nunn, Gregory

21.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

22.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

23.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

24.

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

Rosten, Leo

25.

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

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

29.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

33.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

34.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

35.

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

Zinsser, William

36.

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

Butler, Samuel

37.

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

Collins, Jackie

38.

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

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

41.

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

Hellman, Lillian

42.

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

Porter, Cole

43.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

44.

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

Murdoch, Iris

45.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

46.

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

Zinsser, William

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

50.

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

Hemingway, Ernest