Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Faulkner, William

Edel, Leon

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

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

Steinbeck, John

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

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

10.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Rosten, Leo

14.

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

15.

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

16.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

20.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

21.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

22.

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

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

Pascal, Blaise

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

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

Zinsser, William

26.

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

Mencken, H. L.

27.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Fadiman, Clifton

28.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

29.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

30.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

31.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

32.

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

Faulkner, William

33.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

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.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

39.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

40.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

41.

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

Steinbeck, John

42.

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

James, William

43.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

44.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Rosten, Leo

45.

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

46.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

49.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

50.

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