Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

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

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

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

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

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

Bennett, Arnold

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

10.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

11.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John

12.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

13.

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

Marx, Groucho

14.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

20.

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

21.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Nicolson, Harold

25.

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

26.

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

Faulkner, William

27.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris

28.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

29.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

30.

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

31.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

32.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

33.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

34.

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

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

37.

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

38.

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

Thurber, James

39.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

42.

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

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

44.

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

Faulkner, William

45.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

46.

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

47.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Landor, Walter Savage

48.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

49.

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

50.

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