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Writers and writing

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
- Thurber, James
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Pound, Ezra

2.
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Cather, Willa

3.
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

4.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Walker, Alice

5.
A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.
Nunn, Gregory

6.
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Disraeli, Benjamin

7.
If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
Asimov, Isaac

8.
They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Hellman, Lillian

9.
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Ferber, Edna

10.
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

11.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Steinbeck, John

12.
If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
Martin, Judith

13.
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

14.
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

15.
The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.
Maurois, Andre

16.
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

17.
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

18.
Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
Morrison, Toni

19.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Hemingway, Ernest

20.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
Faulkner, William

21.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Canetti, Elias

22.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

23.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
Maugham, W. Somerset

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.
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
Hazlitt, William

26.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Donleavy, J. P.

27.
A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
Hutchens, John K.

28.
A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
Miller, Henry

29.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

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

32.
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

33.
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
La Bruyere, Jean De

34.
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

35.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Forster, Edward M.

36.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Zinsser, William

37.
I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
Marquis, Don

38.
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Lewis, Cecil Day

39.
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
Levi-Strauss, Claude

40.
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
Zinsser, William

41.
To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.
Barthes, Roland

42.
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.

43.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

44.
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Wilde, Oscar

45.
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.
Wilde, Oscar

46.
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

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

49.
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Burgess, Anthony

50.
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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


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