Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Collins, Jackie

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

10.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

11.

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

12.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

13.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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.

15.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

16.

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

17.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

18.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

19.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

20.

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

Ferber, Edna

21.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

22.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

23.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

24.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

25.

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

Zinsser, William

26.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

27.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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

33.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

34.

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

Anderson, Margaret

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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.

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

38.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

39.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

40.

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

41.

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

Dennis, Patrick

42.

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

Collins, Jackie

43.

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

Steinbeck, John

44.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

45.

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

Sand, George

46.

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

47.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

48.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

49.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

50.

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