Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

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

Martin, Judith

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

10.

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

Hazlitt, William

11.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

13.

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

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

Collins, Jackie

15.

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

16.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

20.

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

Faulkner, William

21.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

22.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

23.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

24.

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

25.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

26.

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

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

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

Zinsser, William

29.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

30.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

31.

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

32.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

35.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Miller, Olin

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

45.

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

Thurber, James

46.

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

47.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

48.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

49.

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

Steinbeck, John

50.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William