Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Zinsser, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Vries, Peter De

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

10.

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

James, William

11.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

12.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

13.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

15.

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.

16.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

17.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

18.

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

19.

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.

Hall, Sir Peter

20.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

21.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

Rushdie, Salman

23.

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

24.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

25.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

Byron, Lord

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

32.

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

33.

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

Sand, George

34.

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

35.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

36.

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

Butler, Samuel

37.

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

Doren, Carl Van

38.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

39.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

40.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

41.

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

Paz, Octavio

42.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

43.

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

44.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

45.

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

Twain, Mark

46.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

47.

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

Raine, Craig

48.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

49.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

50.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles