Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Asimov, Isaac

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Miller, Olin

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

Steinem, Gloria

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Horace

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

Pound, Ezra

17.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

18.

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

19.

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

Hellman, Lillian

20.

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

21.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

22.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

23.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

24.

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

25.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

26.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

27.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

28.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

29.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

30.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

31.

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

Rushdie, Salman

32.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

33.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

34.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

38.

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

Shaw, Irwin

39.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

40.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

41.

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

42.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

43.

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

Asimov, Isaac

44.

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

45.

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

Handke, Peter

46.

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

47.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

49.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

50.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John