Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

- Fadiman, Clifton

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Liebling, A. J.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Mailer, Norman

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

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

Doren, Carl Van

But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Bronte, Charlotte

10.

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

Rice, Anne

11.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Zinsser, William

19.

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

20.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

21.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

22.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

23.

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

Mortimer, John

24.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Miller, Henry

25.

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

Sontag, Susan

26.

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

27.

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

Pascal, Blaise

28.

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

29.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

31.

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

Shaw, Irwin

32.

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

Marx, Groucho

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

35.

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

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

37.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

38.

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

39.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

40.

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

Duncan, Isadora

41.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

42.

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

Bennett, Arnold

43.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

Cooley, Charles Horton

44.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

46.

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.

47.

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

Joyce, James

48.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

50.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman