Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

- Leon, Inigo de

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

Horace

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

11.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

12.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

14.

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

Faulkner, William

15.

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

Vries, Peter De

16.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

17.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

18.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

Ellman, Lucy

22.

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

Kesey, Ken

23.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

24.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

28.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

29.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

30.

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

31.

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

Butler, Samuel

32.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Duncan, Isadora

38.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

39.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

40.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Pound, Ezra

44.

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

Miller, Olin

45.

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

46.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

47.

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

48.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

49.

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