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Writers and writing

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



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Hemingway, Ernest

2.
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
Connolly, Cyril

3.
Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.
Sollers, Philippe

4.
The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.
Nemerov, Howard

5.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Borges, Jorge Luis

6.
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

7.
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

8.
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
Ozick, Cynthia

9.
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
Zinsser, William

10.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Byron, Lord

11.
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

12.
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Marx, Groucho

13.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Nabokov, Vladimir

14.
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
Hemingway, Ernest

15.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Forster, Edward M.

16.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

17.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

18.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.
Benchley, Robert

19.
What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.
Stone, Robert

20.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Paz, Octavio

21.
If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

22.
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

23.
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
Wilder, Thornton

24.
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Dahlberg, Edward

25.
I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.
Hall, Sir Peter

26.
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

27.
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
Benchley, Robert

28.
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

29.
They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
Hemingway, Ernest

30.
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

31.
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.

32.
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Ellman, Lucy

33.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Butler, Samuel

34.
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

35.
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

36.
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.

37.
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
Chandler, Raymond

38.
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
Crisp, Quentin

39.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
Lawrence, D. H.

40.
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

41.
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
La Bruyere, Jean De

42.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Pound, Ezra

43.
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
Herford, Oliver

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.
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

46.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Handke, Peter

47.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

48.
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Lewis, Cecil Day

49.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Woolf, Virginia

50.
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


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