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

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

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

Mortimer, John

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

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

James, William

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

10.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

11.

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

12.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

14.

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

Sontag, Susan

15.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

16.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

17.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Ferber, Edna

20.

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

21.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

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

24.

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

Swift, Jonathan

25.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

26.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

33.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

36.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

37.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

38.

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

Handke, Peter

39.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

41.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

42.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

43.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

48.

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

49.

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

50.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day