Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

- Michener, James A.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

Nicolson, Harold

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Dahlberg, Edward

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

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

Paz, Octavio

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Rascoe, Burton

10.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Wiesel, Elie

11.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

12.

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

Murdoch, Iris

13.

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

Nunn, Gregory

14.

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

15.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

16.

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

Marquis, Don

17.

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

Faulkner, William

18.

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

Baldwin, James

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril

23.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

Maurois, Andre

24.

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

25.

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

Shaw, Irwin

26.

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

27.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

28.

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

Benchley, Robert

29.

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

30.

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

31.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

32.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Man, Paul De

33.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

34.

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

35.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Doctorow, E. L.

36.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

37.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

38.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

39.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

40.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

41.

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

Swift, Jonathan

42.

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

43.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Woolf, Virginia

44.

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

Hellman, Lillian

45.

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

46.

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

47.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Cather, Willa

48.

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

49.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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

Singer, Isaac Bashevis