Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

- Bachelard, Gaston

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

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

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

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

Porter, Cole

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

Hellman, Lillian

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

10.

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

Sontag, Susan

11.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

12.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

13.

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

Dennis, Patrick

14.

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

15.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

16.

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

17.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

23.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

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

25.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

26.

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

Nicolson, Harold

27.

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

Vries, Peter De

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

30.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

31.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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

Corbett, James J.

37.

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

38.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

39.

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

Pascal, Blaise

40.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

41.

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

42.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

43.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

44.

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

45.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Mortimer, John

49.

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

Murdoch, Iris

50.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver