Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Orwell, George

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

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.

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

Handke, Peter

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

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

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

10.

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

Nunn, Gregory

11.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Vidal, Gore

12.

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

13.

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

14.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

17.

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

Shaw, Irwin

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

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

Churchill, Charles

20.

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

21.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Borges, Jorge Luis

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Cheever, John

24.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Benjamin, Walter

25.

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

Murdoch, Iris

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

30.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

31.

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

32.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

33.

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

34.

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

Sand, George

35.

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

36.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

37.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Woolf, Virginia

38.

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

Vorse, Mary Heaton

39.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

40.

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

41.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

Thurber, James

42.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

43.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

44.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Mcewan, Ian

46.

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

47.

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

Doren, Carl Van

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe