Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Canetti, Elias

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

11.

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

Bach, Richard

12.

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

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

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.

15.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

16.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

Vizinczey, Stephen

18.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Churchill, Charles

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Naipaul, V. S.

21.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

22.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

Thurber, James

23.

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

Zinsser, William

24.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

25.

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

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

28.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

29.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Faulkner, William

33.

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.

34.

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

Dyer, Wayne

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Sontag, Susan

38.

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

39.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

40.

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

Doren, Carl Van

41.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Pope, Alexander

43.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Ozick, Cynthia

44.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

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

Rushdie, Salman

46.

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

Twain, Mark

47.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

48.

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

Horace

49.

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

Lewis, Cecil Day

50.

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