Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

- Borges, Jorge Luis

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

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

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

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

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

10.

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

Horace

11.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

12.

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

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.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

Zinsser, William

17.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Handke, Peter

21.

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

Zinsser, William

22.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

27.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

28.

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

Sand, George

29.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

30.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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

Liebling, A. J.

32.

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

Butler, Samuel

33.

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

34.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

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.

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.

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

38.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

39.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

40.

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

Rosten, Leo

41.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

43.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

44.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

45.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

46.

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

Anderson, Margaret

47.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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.

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

50.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest