Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.

- Ellman, Lucy

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Smith, Nancy Banks

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

Pascal, Blaise

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.

Benchley, Robert

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

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

10.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

11.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

12.

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

Porter, Cole

13.

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

Raine, Craig

14.

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

Kraus, Karl

15.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

17.

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

Handke, Peter

18.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Pascal, Blaise

23.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

24.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

25.

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

Pound, Ezra

26.

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.

Swift, Jonathan

27.

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

Liebling, A. J.

28.

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

29.

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

Duncan, Isadora

30.

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

Churchill, Charles

31.

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

Asimov, Isaac

32.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

33.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

34.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

35.

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

36.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

37.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

38.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

39.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

40.

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

41.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

42.

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

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Woolf, Virginia

45.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

46.

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

Dennis, Patrick

47.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Hazlitt, William

49.

Let's face it, writing is hell.