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

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

Porter, Cole

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

Miller, Olin

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

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

Sontag, Susan

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

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

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

10.

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

Woolf, Virginia

11.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

12.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

13.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

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

15.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

16.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

17.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

18.

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

19.

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

Nunn, Gregory

20.

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

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

25.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

26.

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

27.

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

Faulkner, William

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

33.

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

34.

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

Hutchens, John K.

35.

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

36.

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

Handke, Peter

37.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

38.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

39.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

40.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

41.

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

42.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

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

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

46.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

47.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

48.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

49.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick