Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Porter, Cole

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

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

10.

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

11.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

12.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

13.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

14.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.

Davies, Robertson

15.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

16.

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

Marquis, Don

17.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

18.

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

Vries, Peter De

19.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

20.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

21.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Woolf, Virginia

25.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

27.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

28.

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

Thurber, James

29.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

30.

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

Paz, Octavio

31.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Steinem, Gloria

35.

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

36.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

39.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

40.

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

41.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

Murdoch, Iris

43.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

44.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

48.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

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.

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