Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

- Burgess, Anthony

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Martin, Judith

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

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

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

Dyer, Wayne

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

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

Pascal, Blaise

11.

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

12.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

13.

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

Nunn, Gregory

14.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

15.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

16.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

17.

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

Zinsser, William

18.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

20.

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

Goodman, Ellen

21.

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

22.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Anderson, Margaret

30.

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

Sand, George

31.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

32.

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

33.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser, William

34.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

Stone, Robert

35.

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

36.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Marx, Groucho

40.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

41.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

42.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

43.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

44.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

45.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

46.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

47.

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

Hellman, Lillian

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore