Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Zinsser, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

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

Zinsser, William

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

10.

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

11.

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

Ellman, Lucy

12.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

14.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

17.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

18.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

22.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

23.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

24.

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

Swift, Jonathan

25.

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

26.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

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.

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

Zinsser, William

31.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

32.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

33.

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.

34.

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

Mortimer, John

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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.

40.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

41.

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

Nunn, Gregory

42.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

43.

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

Gribbon, George

44.

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

Butler, Samuel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Dennis, Patrick

48.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

49.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

50.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.