Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Duncan, Isadora

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Byron, Lord

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

11.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

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.

13.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

14.

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

15.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

16.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

17.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

18.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

19.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

20.

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

21.

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

Murdoch, Iris

22.

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

23.

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

James, William

24.

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

25.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

26.

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

27.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

28.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

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.

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

31.

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

32.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

33.

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

34.

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

Steinem, Gloria

35.

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

36.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

37.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

38.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

39.

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

40.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

43.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

46.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

47.

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

48.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

49.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.