Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Zinsser, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

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

Lawrence, D. H.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

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

Orwell, George

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Dennis, Patrick

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.

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

11.

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

Sontag, Susan

12.

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

Marquis, Don

13.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

14.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

18.

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

Duncan, Isadora

19.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

20.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

21.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

25.

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

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

28.

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.

29.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

30.

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

Doren, Carl Van

31.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

32.

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

33.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

34.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

35.

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

36.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

37.

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

Liebling, A. J.

38.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

39.

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

Corbett, James J.

40.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

45.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

47.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.