Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is thinking on paper.

- Zinsser, William

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Collins, Jackie

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

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

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

Handke, Peter

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

Dahlberg, Edward

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

10.

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

11.

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

Rushdie, Salman

12.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

16.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

17.

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

Zinsser, William

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

22.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

23.

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

24.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

25.

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.

Mailer, Norman

26.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

27.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

28.

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

Twain, Mark

29.

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

30.

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

James, William

32.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

33.

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

34.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

35.

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

Baldwin, James

36.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

37.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

38.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

39.

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

Butler, Samuel

40.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

41.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

42.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

44.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

45.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

46.

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

Marquis, Don

47.

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

Gribbon, George

48.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

49.

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