Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.

- Wheeler, Bill

Best Quotes about Writers and writing

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

Burgess, Anthony

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 can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Goodman, Ellen

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

Thurber, James

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Kesey, Ken

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.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Brookner, Anita

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Butler, Samuel

10.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Ferber, Edna

11.

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

12.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Porter, Cole

13.

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

14.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Algren, Nelson

15.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.

Rau, Santha Rama

16.

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

Pound, Ezra

17.

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

18.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

19.

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

20.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

21.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Sagan, Francoise

22.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

La Bruyere, Jean De

23.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Zinsser, William

24.

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

25.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Mailer, Norman

26.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Blanchot, Maurice

27.

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

28.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Rushdie, Salman

29.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Walker, Alice

31.

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

32.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Didion, Joan

33.

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

34.

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

35.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Mcmurtry, Larry

36.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

Byron, Lord

37.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

Rice, Anne

39.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Zinsser, William

40.

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

Sontag, Susan

41.

If you wish to be a writer; write!

Epictetus

42.

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Bagnold, Enid

43.

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

Mortimer, John

44.

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Hutchens, John K.

45.

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

Pound, Ezra

46.

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