Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

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

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

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

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

Thurber, James

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

Anderson, Margaret

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Fadiman, Clifton

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

Sackville-West, Vita

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Shaw, Irwin

11.

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

12.

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

Asimov, Isaac

13.

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

Hellman, Lillian

14.

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

15.

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

16.

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

17.

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

Steinbeck, John

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

Burgess, Anthony

21.

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

22.

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

Pascal, Blaise

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

25.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

26.

Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.

Sollers, Philippe

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

Sontag, Susan

30.

Easy writings curse is hard reading.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

31.

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.

32.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Thurber, James

36.

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

37.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

38.

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

39.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Rice, Anne

40.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Benchley, Robert

41.

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

Swift, Jonathan

42.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Orwell, George

43.

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

44.

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

Forster, Edward M.

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Crisp, Quentin

47.

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

48.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

49.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Chandler, Raymond

50.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Connolly, Cyril