Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Sontag, Susan

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

Steinbeck, John

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

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

Horace

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

Mortimer, John

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

Bennett, Arnold

10.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Nabokov, Vladimir

12.

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

13.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

14.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

17.

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

18.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

19.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Rosten, Leo

23.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Butler, Samuel

24.

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

25.

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

Forster, Edward M.

26.

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

27.

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

Corbett, James J.

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

Dennis, Patrick

31.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Paz, Octavio

32.

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

Bowen, Catherine Drinker

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

35.

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

Raine, Craig

36.

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

37.

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

Liebling, A. J.

38.

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.

Steinbeck, John

39.

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

Doren, Carl Van

40.

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

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

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

43.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell, George

44.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Auden, W. H.

45.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

Zinsser, William

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.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Borges, Jorge Luis

48.

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

Sand, George

49.

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

50.

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

Horace