Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

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

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

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Faulkner, William

10.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

11.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

12.

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

13.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

14.

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

Woolf, Virginia

15.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

16.

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

Freud, Sigmund

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

21.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

23.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

Goodman, Ellen

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Butler, Samuel

30.

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

Bennett, Arnold

31.

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

32.

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

Sand, George

33.

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

Forster, Edward M.

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

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

36.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

37.

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

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

40.

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

41.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

43.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

44.

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

45.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

46.

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

Rushdie, Salman

47.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

48.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

49.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

50.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel