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

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

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

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

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

13.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

James, William

17.

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

18.

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

Murdoch, Iris

19.

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

20.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

21.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

22.

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

Horace

23.

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.

24.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

25.

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

26.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

27.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

28.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Marx, Groucho

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

37.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

38.

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

Zinsser, William

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

41.

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

Steinbeck, John

42.

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

43.

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

Hutchens, John K.

44.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

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

Sontag, Susan

48.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.