Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Zinsser, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Zinsser, William

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

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

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Faulkner, William

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

10.

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

Doren, Carl Van

11.

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

Swift, Jonathan

12.

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

Murdoch, Iris

13.

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

14.

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

Gribbon, George

15.

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

16.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

17.

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

18.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

19.

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

Thurber, James

20.

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

21.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

22.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

25.

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

26.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

27.

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

Handke, Peter

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

Paz, Octavio

30.

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

Burgess, Anthony

31.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

32.

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

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

34.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

35.

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

Horace

36.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

37.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

38.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

39.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

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

Goodman, Ellen

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

43.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

44.

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

45.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

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

Hellman, Lillian

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

49.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

50.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise