Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Hemingway, Ernest

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

Corbett, James J.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Joyce, James

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.

Edel, Leon

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

Thurber, James

10.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

11.

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

12.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

Connolly, Cyril

13.

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

14.

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

Liebling, A. J.

15.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Morrison, Toni

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

22.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

Twain, Mark

23.

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

Pascal, Blaise

24.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Ferber, Edna

25.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Bach, Richard

26.

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

Pascal, Blaise

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Forster, Edward M.

30.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Woolf, Virginia

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

Ellman, Lucy

38.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

39.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Mortimer, John

40.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Rosten, Leo

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

Smith, Dr. Walter

43.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Collins, Jackie

45.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Rushdie, Salman

46.

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

47.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Faulkner, William

48.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Raine, Craig

49.

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

Hellman, Lillian

50.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Horace