Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

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

Rice, Anne

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

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

Boileau, Nicholas

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

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

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

Nunn, Gregory

14.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

15.

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

16.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

17.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

19.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

20.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

21.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

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

Mencken, H. L.

25.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

26.

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

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

Hutchens, John K.

28.

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

29.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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.

34.

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

Dennis, Patrick

35.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

36.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

37.

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

38.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

39.

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

40.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

Canetti, Elias

42.

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

43.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

44.

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

James, William

45.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Joyce, James