Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Steinbeck, John

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

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Landor, Walter Savage

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

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

Zinsser, William

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

10.

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

11.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

12.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

19.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

20.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

21.

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

Corbett, James J.

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

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

25.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

26.

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

27.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

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

Hazlitt, William

31.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

36.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

37.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

38.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

39.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

40.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

41.

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

42.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

43.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

44.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

45.

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

Nicolson, Harold

46.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

47.

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

48.

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

49.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

50.

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

Dyer, Wayne