Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Duncan, Isadora

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

Churchill, Charles

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

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

Rushdie, Salman

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

10.

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

Naipaul, V. S.

11.

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

12.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

13.

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

14.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

15.

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

Sand, George

16.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

17.

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

18.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

19.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Auden, W. H.

20.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

21.

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

Porter, Cole

22.

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

Kesey, Ken

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

Hall, Sir Peter

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

Nicolson, Harold

27.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

28.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

29.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

Byron, Lord

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Shaw, Irwin

35.

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

36.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

37.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

38.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

39.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

40.

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

41.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

Doren, Carl Van

42.

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

Pascal, Blaise

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

49.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

50.

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