Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Richler, Mordecai

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

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

Rushdie, Salman

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.

Boileau, Nicholas

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

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

Faulkner, William

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

Porter, Cole

10.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

11.

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

Pascal, Blaise

12.

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

13.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

14.

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

Rushdie, Salman

15.

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

Bennett, Arnold

16.

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

Faulkner, William

17.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

21.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

22.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

23.

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

Sand, George

24.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

25.

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

26.

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

Steinbeck, John

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

29.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

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

35.

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Golding, William

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel

41.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

43.

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

44.

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