Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

- Zinsser, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

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

Duncan, Isadora

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Thurber, James

10.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Zinsser, William

15.

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

Baldwin, James

16.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

17.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

18.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

19.

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

Liebling, A. J.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

23.

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

Corbett, James J.

24.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

25.

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

26.

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

Byron, Lord

27.

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

Bennett, Arnold

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

30.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

31.

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

Marquis, Don

32.

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

Murdoch, Iris

33.

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

Miller, Olin

34.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

38.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

40.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

42.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

Vries, Peter De

44.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

45.

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

46.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

49.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

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