Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Twain, Mark

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

Faulkner, William

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

10.

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

11.

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

Faulkner, William

12.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

14.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Socrates

15.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

16.

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

Butler, Samuel

17.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

18.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

19.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Russell, Bertrand

20.

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

Marx, Groucho

21.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Vorse, Mary Heaton

22.

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.

23.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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.

25.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Amis, Martin

26.

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

27.

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

Collins, Jackie

28.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

29.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

30.

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

Hellman, Lillian

31.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

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.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

38.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Nunn, Gregory

39.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

40.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

41.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Kraus, Karl

46.

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

Bennett, Arnold

47.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

48.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

49.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

50.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Steinbeck, John