Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Pound, Ezra

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

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

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

10.

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

Goodman, Ellen

11.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

12.

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

Benchley, Robert

13.

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

Duncan, Isadora

14.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

15.

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

Corbett, James J.

16.

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

Churchill, Charles

17.

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

Steinbeck, John

18.

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

Paz, Octavio

19.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

20.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

21.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

22.

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

23.

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

24.

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

Orwell, George

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Liebling, A. J.

29.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

30.

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

31.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

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

Marx, Groucho

35.

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

36.

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

Twain, Mark

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

46.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Sand, George

50.

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.