Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Miller, Olin

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

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

Dyer, Wayne

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

10.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

11.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

12.

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

13.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

14.

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

15.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

16.

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

Nicolson, Harold

17.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

18.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

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

Liebling, A. J.

21.

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

Faulkner, William

22.

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

Ferber, Edna

23.

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

24.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

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

27.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

28.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

30.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

31.

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

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

34.

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

Murdoch, Iris

35.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

36.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

37.

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

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

39.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Hazlitt, William

43.

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

Raine, Craig

44.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

45.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

46.

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

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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

49.

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

Canetti, Elias

50.

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