Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Horace

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

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

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

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

10.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

11.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

12.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

13.

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

14.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

Hellman, Lillian

17.

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

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

21.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

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

Gribbon, George

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.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

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

Duncan, Isadora

26.

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

27.

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

Collins, Jackie

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.

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

Pascal, Blaise

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Steinbeck, John

34.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

35.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

36.

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

37.

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

Paz, Octavio

38.

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

Russell, Bertrand

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

45.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

46.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

47.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

48.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

49.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

50.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan