Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

- Walker, Alice

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

O'Connor, Flannery

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

James, Henry

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

Wilde, Oscar

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

Farrar, John

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

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

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

Steinem, Gloria

10.

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

Woolf, Virginia

11.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

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

13.

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

Faulkner, William

14.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Faulkner, William

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

Herford, Oliver

18.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

Strindberg, J. August

19.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Dyer, Wayne

20.

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

Benchley, Robert

21.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Brodsky, Joseph

25.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

26.

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

Shaw, Irwin

27.

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

Lemmon, Jack

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Fowler, Gene

31.

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

Asimov, Isaac

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

Michener, James A.

36.

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

Sand, George

37.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Pound, Ezra

38.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

39.

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

Gribbon, George

40.

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

Handke, Peter

41.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

Pound, Ezra

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

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

44.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Duncan, Isadora

45.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Miller, Olin

46.

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

Kraus, Karl

47.

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

48.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Benchley, Robert

49.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.

Vries, Peter De