Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Steinbeck, John

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Konrad, George

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Zinsser, William

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Rushdie, Salman

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

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Wilder, Thornton

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Styron, William

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Smith, Dr. Walter

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

Orwell, George

10.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

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

12.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Synge, J. M.

13.

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

14.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Burgess, Anthony

15.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

16.

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

Thurber, James

17.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Steinbeck, John

19.

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.

20.

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

Swift, Jonathan

21.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

Orwell, George

23.

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

24.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

25.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

26.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

27.

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

28.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

29.

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

Churchill, Charles

30.

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

31.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Thurber, James

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Galeano, Eduardo

36.

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

37.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

Meyer, Paul J.

39.

Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.

Dennis, Patrick

40.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.

Nemerov, Howard

41.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Bennett, Arnold

42.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

King, Stephen

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

Leon, Inigo de

47.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

48.

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