Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

- Brookner, Anita

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

Marx, Groucho

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

Rushdie, Salman

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

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

Gribbon, George

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

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

10.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

13.

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

14.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

15.

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

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

18.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

19.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

20.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

21.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

Faulkner, William

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

25.

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

26.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Parker, Dorothy

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

Michener, James A.

32.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

33.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

Martin, Judith

34.

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

Thurber, James

35.

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

36.

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

Handke, Peter

37.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

38.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

40.

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

Dyer, Wayne

41.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

43.

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

44.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

45.

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

46.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

48.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

49.

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

50.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William