Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

- Martin, Judith

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Shaw, Irwin

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

Sand, George

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

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

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

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

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

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

Corbett, James J.

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

Havel, Vaclav

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

18.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

19.

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

Faulkner, William

20.

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

21.

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

Marquis, Don

22.

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

Woolf, Virginia

23.

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

Kraus, Karl

24.

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

Benchley, Robert

25.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

26.

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

Canetti, Elias

28.

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

29.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Orwell, George

30.

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

31.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

32.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Freud, Sigmund

37.

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

38.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

40.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Swift, Jonathan

41.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

42.

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

44.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

45.

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

Murdoch, Iris

46.

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

Dyer, Wayne

47.

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

Byron, Lord

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis