Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

- Donleavy, J. P.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Anderson, Margaret

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

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

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

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

Sand, George

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

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

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

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

10.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

11.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

Murdoch, Iris

13.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

14.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

15.

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

Paz, Octavio

16.

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

17.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

18.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

19.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

23.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

25.

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

Steinbeck, John

26.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

27.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

28.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

29.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

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.

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

Rushdie, Salman

32.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

33.

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

34.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

35.

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

Porter, Cole

36.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

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

38.

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

Zinsser, William

39.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

40.

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

Sontag, Susan

41.

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

Borges, Jorge Luis

42.

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

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

Woolf, Virginia

45.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

47.

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

48.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

49.

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

50.

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