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

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

Boileau, Nicholas

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

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

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

Murdoch, Iris

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

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

Forster, Edward M.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

Twain, Mark

10.

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

11.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

12.

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

Handke, Peter

13.

Wiesel, Elie

14.

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

15.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

16.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

17.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

20.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

22.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

23.

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

24.

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

Thurber, James

25.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

26.

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

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.

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

Zinsser, William

29.

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

30.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

31.

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

32.

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

Steinem, Gloria

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

35.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

36.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

37.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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

39.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

40.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Zinsser, William

44.

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

45.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

46.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

47.

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.

48.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

49.

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

Collins, Jackie

50.

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

Miller, Olin