Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

- Byron, Lord

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Liebling, A. J.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Rushdie, Salman

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

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

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Kraus, Karl

10.

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

Orwell, George

11.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

13.

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

14.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

15.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

16.

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

Pascal, Blaise

17.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

18.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

19.

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

20.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

21.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

24.

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

Zinsser, William

25.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

26.

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

Byron, Lord

27.

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

Kesey, Ken

28.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

29.

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.

30.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

34.

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

35.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

Aldiss, Brian

36.

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

37.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

38.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

41.

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

42.

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

Rice, Anne

43.

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

44.

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

Asimov, Isaac

45.

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

Handke, Peter

46.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

48.

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

49.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

50.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.