Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Naipaul, V. S.

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

To write is a humiliation.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Zinsser, William

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

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

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

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Hemingway, Ernest

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De

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.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

10.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

11.

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

12.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

White, Elwyn Brooks

13.

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

14.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Steinem, Gloria

15.

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.

16.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Orwell, George

20.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

21.

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

Russell, Bertrand

22.

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

23.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

24.

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

Ellman, Lucy

25.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Pascal, Blaise

27.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.

Crowley, Aleister

28.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

29.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

30.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

31.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

Khayyam, Omar

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Connolly, Cyril

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.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

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

37.

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

Horace

38.

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

Murdoch, Iris

39.

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

40.

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

Nicolson, Harold

41.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Liebling, A. J.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Cather, Willa

45.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

Trocchi, Alexander

46.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

47.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

48.

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

Steinbeck, John

49.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

50.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Brooks, Mel