Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Bach, Richard

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Forster, Edward M.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

10.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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.

12.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

13.

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

14.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

15.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

17.

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

Porter, Cole

18.

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

19.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

20.

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

Zinsser, William

21.

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

22.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

23.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

24.

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

Paz, Octavio

25.

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

26.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

27.

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

28.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

29.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

30.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

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

Baldwin, James

33.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

34.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

35.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

36.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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.

39.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Marx, Groucho

40.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

41.

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

Zinsser, William

42.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

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

45.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

46.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

49.

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

Handke, Peter

50.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin