Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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

Mortimer, John

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

10.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

11.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

12.

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

Handke, Peter

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Faulkner, William

16.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

17.

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

Paz, Octavio

18.

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.

19.

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

Anderson, Margaret

20.

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

21.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

22.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

23.

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

24.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

25.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

26.

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

Baldwin, James

27.

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

Ferber, Edna

28.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

29.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

30.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

31.

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

32.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

35.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

36.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

37.

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

38.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

39.

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

40.

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

Asimov, Isaac

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

44.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

45.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

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

47.

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

Horace

48.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

49.

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

50.

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