Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

- Horace

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Sand, George

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Wilde, Oscar

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

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

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

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

Fadiman, Clifton

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf, Virginia

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Vidal, Gore

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

Collins, Jackie

10.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

11.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

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

Ellman, Lucy

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.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

15.

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

16.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

Pascal, Blaise

19.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

20.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

21.

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

22.

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

Duncan, Isadora

23.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

24.

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

25.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

26.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

27.

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

28.

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

Rushdie, Salman

29.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

30.

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

31.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Hellman, Lillian

32.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

37.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

38.

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

Baldwin, James

39.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret

46.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

47.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

Barthes, Roland

48.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

49.

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

Benchley, Robert

50.

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

Mencken, H. L.