Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

- Woolf, Virginia

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Rice, Anne

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

Sand, George

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

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Marx, Groucho

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

Zinsser, William

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

10.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

11.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

12.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

13.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

14.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

15.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

16.

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

17.

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

Sontag, Susan

18.

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

19.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

20.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

22.

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

Liebling, A. J.

23.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

27.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

30.

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

Dennis, Patrick

31.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

32.

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

33.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Zinsser, William

35.

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

36.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

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

Swift, Jonathan

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

Mortimer, John

40.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

41.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

42.

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

Handke, Peter

43.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

44.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

48.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

49.

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

Pound, Ezra

50.

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

Butler, Samuel