Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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

- Benchley, Robert

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Byron, Lord

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

Collins, Jackie

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Lewis, Cecil Day

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

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Bachelard, Gaston

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.

Morrison, Edmund

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

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

10.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

11.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Churchill, Winston

12.

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

13.

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

Woolf, Virginia

14.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Pinter, Harold

15.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Rice, Anne

17.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Smith, Nancy Banks

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Dahlberg, Edward

20.

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

Joyce, James

21.

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

Dennis, Patrick

22.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

James, William

23.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

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

25.

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

Marquis, Don

26.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

Burchill, Julie

27.

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.

28.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Yeats, William Butler

32.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Baldwin, James

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

35.

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

36.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

37.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Donleavy, J. P.

38.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

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

Anderson, Margaret

40.

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

Wheeler, Bill

41.

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

42.

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

Rushdie, Salman

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Mortimer, John

46.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Franklin, Benjamin

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 responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Baldwin, James

49.

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

50.

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

Corbett, James J.