Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

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

Swift, Jonathan

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

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

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Pound, Ezra

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

Murdoch, Iris

21.

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

Baldwin, James

22.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

23.

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

Bennett, Arnold

24.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

26.

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

Duncan, Isadora

27.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Miller, Olin

30.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

31.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

32.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

33.

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

34.

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

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

Butler, Samuel

36.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

37.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

Michener, James A.

39.

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

Marx, Groucho

40.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

41.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

45.

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

46.

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

Pirandello, Luigi

47.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Horace

48.

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

Faulkner, William

49.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

50.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita