Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Orwell, George

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

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

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

Kesey, Ken

10.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

11.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

12.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

13.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

14.

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

Baldwin, James

15.

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

Rice, Anne

16.

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

Rushdie, Salman

17.

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

Paz, Octavio

18.

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

19.

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

20.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

22.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

23.

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

24.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

25.

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

Handke, Peter

26.

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

27.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

28.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

29.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

30.

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

31.

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

Butler, Samuel

32.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

33.

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

Duncan, Isadora

34.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

35.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

36.

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

James, William

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Porter, Cole

39.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

40.

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

41.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

42.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

43.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

44.

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

45.

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

46.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

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

49.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

50.

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

Zinsser, William