Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

- Yeats, William Butler

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Marx, Groucho

10.

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

Nunn, Gregory

11.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

12.

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.

13.

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

Freud, Sigmund

14.

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

Murdoch, Iris

15.

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

Sand, George

16.

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

17.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

18.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

19.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

20.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

21.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

22.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

23.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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

25.

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

Raine, Craig

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

28.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

29.

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

Hutchens, John K.

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.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

32.

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

Zinsser, William

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

35.

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

Canetti, Elias

36.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

38.

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

Paz, Octavio

39.

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

Dennis, Patrick

40.

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

Thurber, James

41.

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

42.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

43.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

46.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

49.

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

Collins, Jackie

50.

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

Swift, Jonathan