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Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
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

2.
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
Rushdie, Salman

3.
If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.
Parker, Dorothy

4.
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

5.
He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.
Boileau, Nicholas

6.
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

7.
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

8.
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold

9.
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

10.
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
Miller, Olin

11.
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

12.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
Thurber, James

13.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
Faulkner, William

14.
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

15.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Donleavy, J. P.

16.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
Faulkner, William

17.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Butler, Samuel

18.
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

19.
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
Steinbeck, John

20.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Hemingway, Ernest

21.
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

22.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
Rushdie, Salman

23.
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

24.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Byron, Lord

25.
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

26.
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves -- that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives -- experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

27.
Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.
Swift, Jonathan

28.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Benchley, Robert

29.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Mailer, Norman

30.
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

31.
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
Cather, Willa

32.
I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.
Vries, Peter De

33.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Woolf, Virginia

34.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
Mencken, H. L.

35.
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
Bennett, Arnold

36.
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
Hazlitt, William

37.
If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.
I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
Marquis, Don

39.
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

40.
If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
Martin, Judith

41.
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

42.
How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.
Dyer, Wayne

43.
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

44.
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Pinter, Harold

45.
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
Rice, Anne

46.
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
Maugham, W. Somerset

47.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Naipaul, V. S.

48.
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Dahlberg, Edward

49.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Pound, Ezra

50.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
Maugham, W. Somerset


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