Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

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

Steinem, Gloria

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Man, Paul De

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

10.

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

11.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Hemingway, Ernest

13.

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

14.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Forster, Edward M.

15.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

16.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Pascal, Blaise

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Shaw, Irwin

21.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Handke, Peter

22.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

23.

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

Horace

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.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

26.

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

Orwell, George

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

29.

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

30.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

Asimov, Isaac

31.

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

Thurber, James

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Baldwin, James

36.

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

Kraus, Karl

37.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

38.

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

39.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace

40.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

42.

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

Murdoch, Iris

43.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Miller, Henry

44.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

47.

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

48.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Blanchot, Maurice

49.

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

50.

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Anderson, Margaret