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Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Chandler, Raymond

2.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Mailer, Norman

3.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
Thurber, James

4.
Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

5.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
Auden, W. H.

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

9.
Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.
Dennis, Patrick

10.
Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.
Smith, Dr. Walter

11.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Hemingway, Ernest

12.
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

13.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Steinem, Gloria

14.
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
Zinsser, William

15.
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.
Horace

16.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
Wilde, Oscar

17.
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.

18.
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
Algren, Nelson

19.
If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.
Pascal, Blaise

20.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Donleavy, J. P.

21.
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
Ferber, Edna

22.
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Kesey, Ken

23.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
Sackville-West, Vita

24.
Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.
Swift, Jonathan

25.
If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

26.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Dahlberg, Edward

27.
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold

28.
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

29.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Butler, Samuel

30.
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

31.
You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.
Horace

32.
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.

33.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
Maugham, W. Somerset

34.
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Marx, Groucho

35.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

36.
To write is a humiliation.
Dahlberg, Edward

37.
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
Duncan, Isadora

38.
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

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

40.
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

41.
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Hemingway, Ernest

42.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
Faulkner, William

43.
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

44.
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.

45.
If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
Martin, Judith

46.
If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
Asimov, Isaac

47.
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.

48.
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

49.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Raine, Craig

50.
The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.
Pascal, Blaise


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