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Writers and writing

Writers are always selling somebody out.
- Didion, Joan
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
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

2.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Auden, W. H.

3.
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo

4.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Pound, Ezra

5.
Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

6.
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
Miller, Henry

7.
A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
Hutchens, John K.

8.
If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

9.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Goodman, Ellen

10.
Let's face it, writing is hell.
Styron, William

11.
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Ellman, Lucy

12.
Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
James, William

13.
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
Hazlitt, William

14.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Joyce, James

15.
The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.
Horace

16.
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.
Porter, Cole

17.
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

18.
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

19.
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

20.
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

21.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Byron, Lord

22.
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

23.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Benchley, Robert

24.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

25.
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

26.
Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
Wiesel, Elie

27.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Canetti, Elias

28.
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
Shaw, Irwin

29.
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.

30.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.
Woolf, Virginia

31.
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.

32.
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.
Havel, Vaclav

33.
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

34.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
Thurber, James

35.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

36.
He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.
Boileau, Nicholas

37.
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold

38.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

39.
Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.
Smith, Dr. Walter

40.
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

41.
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
White, Elwyn Brooks

42.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
Maugham, W. Somerset

43.
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

44.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
Mencken, H. L.

45.
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

46.
Writing is a craft not an art.
Zinsser, William

47.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Franklin, Benjamin

48.
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

49.
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.

50.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Handke, Peter


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