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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.
Orwell, George

2.
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
Michener, James A.

3.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
Maugham, W. Somerset

4.
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.
Wilde, Oscar

5.
If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

6.
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
Shaw, Irwin

7.
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

8.
To write is a humiliation.
Dahlberg, Edward

9.
Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
Doren, Carl Van

10.
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.
Horace

11.
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
Zinsser, William

12.
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
Socrates

13.
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

14.
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

15.
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Lewis, Cecil Day

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.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
Faulkner, William

18.
A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
Hutchens, John K.

19.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

20.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Forster, Edward M.

21.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Paz, Octavio

22.
As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
Twain, Mark

23.
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

24.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Fadiman, Clifton

25.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

26.
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
Liebling, A. J.

27.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

28.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Didion, Joan

29.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Zinsser, William

30.
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

31.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Hellman, Lillian

32.
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

33.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
Shaw, George Bernard

34.
If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
Asimov, Isaac

35.
I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.
Russell, Bertrand

36.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

37.
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

38.
In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
Cooley, Charles Horton

39.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Donleavy, J. P.

40.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Nabokov, Vladimir

41.
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

42.
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

43.
Let's face it, writing is hell.
Styron, William

44.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Benchley, Robert

45.
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

46.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Borges, Jorge Luis

47.
I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.
Konrad, George

48.
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

49.
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.
Bronte, Charlotte

50.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
Baldwin, James


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