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

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

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

Paz, Octavio

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

13.

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

Vries, Peter De

14.

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

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.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

17.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

18.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

19.

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

20.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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.

22.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

23.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

24.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

25.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

26.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

27.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

28.

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

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

Nicolson, Harold

32.

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

Nunn, Gregory

33.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

34.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

35.

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

Ferber, Edna

36.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

37.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

38.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

39.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

41.

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

42.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

43.

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

Goodman, Ellen

44.

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

45.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Woolf, Virginia

49.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

50.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen