Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Anderson, Margaret

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Hutchens, John K.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Sontag, Susan

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

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

10.

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

Hellman, Lillian

11.

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

Mortimer, John

12.

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

Kesey, Ken

13.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

16.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

17.

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

18.

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

Faulkner, William

19.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

20.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

21.

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

22.

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

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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

25.

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

Liebling, A. J.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

30.

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

Rushdie, Salman

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

33.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

Horace

35.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

36.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

37.

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

38.

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

Butler, Samuel

39.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

40.

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

Doren, Carl Van

41.

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

42.

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

Handke, Peter

43.

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

44.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Pascal, Blaise

50.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset