Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Boileau, Nicholas

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Dennis, Patrick

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

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

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

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

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

10.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

17.

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

Duncan, Isadora

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

20.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

21.

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

Swift, Jonathan

22.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

24.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

25.

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

Zinsser, William

26.

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

27.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

31.

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

Miller, Olin

32.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

33.

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

James, William

34.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Horace

37.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

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

39.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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.

41.

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

Hellman, Lillian

42.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

43.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

44.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

45.

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

46.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

47.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

48.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

49.

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

50.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril