Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

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

Dennis, Patrick

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

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

Paz, Octavio

10.

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

Hellman, Lillian

11.

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

12.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

16.

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

17.

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

Faulkner, William

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

Mortimer, John

24.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

25.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

26.

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

Zinsser, William

27.

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

Martin, Judith

28.

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

Rice, Anne

29.

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

Zinsser, William

30.

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

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

37.

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

Faulkner, William

38.

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

39.

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

40.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

41.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

42.

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

Orwell, George

43.

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

Kesey, Ken

44.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

46.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

47.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord