Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Duncan, Isadora

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.

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

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

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

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

12.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

13.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

17.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

18.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

19.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

22.

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

23.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Nicolson, Harold

26.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

27.

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

28.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

29.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

30.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

31.

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

Faulkner, William

32.

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

33.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Handke, Peter

35.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

36.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

37.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

38.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

39.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

40.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

41.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

42.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

43.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

44.

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

45.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

46.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

47.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

48.

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

Kraus, Karl

49.

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

50.

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

Marx, Groucho