Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

- Benjamin, Walter

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

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

Twain, Mark

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Thurber, James

10.

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

11.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

12.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

13.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

14.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

15.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

17.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

20.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

21.

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

Steinbeck, John

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Bach, Richard

25.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

26.

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

Hellman, Lillian

27.

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

28.

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

Handke, Peter

29.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

30.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

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.

32.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

33.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

34.

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

Goodman, Ellen

35.

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

36.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

37.

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

Duncan, Isadora

38.

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

Bennett, Arnold

39.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

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

Baldwin, James

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

45.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

46.

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

Rushdie, Salman

47.

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

Swift, Jonathan

48.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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