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

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Faulkner, William

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

Wilde, Oscar

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

10.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

14.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

15.

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

16.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

17.

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

18.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

19.

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

Steinem, Gloria

20.

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

21.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

22.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

24.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

25.

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

26.

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

Martin, Judith

27.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

28.

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.

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

Handke, Peter

31.

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

Corbett, James J.

32.

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

33.

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

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

Rushdie, Salman

35.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

36.

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.

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Raine, Craig

44.

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

45.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

46.

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

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

49.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

50.

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

Hemingway, Ernest