Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Gribbon, George

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

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

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

Butler, Samuel

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

Johnson, Samuel

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

10.

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

Dennis, Patrick

11.

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

12.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

15.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

16.

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

Gribbon, George

17.

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

18.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

19.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

20.

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

Baldwin, James

21.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

22.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

27.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

28.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

29.

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

Anderson, Margaret

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

Sand, George

33.

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

Goodman, Ellen

34.

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

Russell, Bertrand

35.

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

Hellman, Lillian

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

38.

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

Steinem, Gloria

39.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

40.

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

41.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

42.

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

James, William

43.

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

44.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

45.

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

46.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

47.

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

Marquis, Don

48.

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

49.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

50.

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

Murdoch, Iris