Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

- Canetti, Elias

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

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.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

Gribbon, George

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

10.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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

12.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

17.

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

Rice, Anne

18.

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

19.

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

20.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

22.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

23.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

24.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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

25.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Hutchens, John K.

29.

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

Benchley, Robert

30.

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

Marx, Groucho

31.

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

Bennett, Arnold

32.

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

33.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

34.

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

35.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

36.

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

37.

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

Dyer, Wayne

38.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

39.

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

40.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

43.

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

Zinsser, William

44.

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

Zinsser, William

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

47.

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

Rushdie, Salman

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle