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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
Maugham, W. Somerset

2.
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.
Davies, Robertson

3.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
Maugham, W. Somerset

4.
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Richler, Mordecai

5.
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
Sontag, Susan

6.
The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place.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

7.
I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.
Russell, Bertrand

8.
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
Steinbeck, John

9.
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

10.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
Thurber, James

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

12.
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

13.
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
James, Henry

14.
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Cather, Willa

15.
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Burgess, Anthony

16.
If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
Collins, Jackie

17.
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

18.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Rushdie, Salman

19.
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

20.
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
Khayyam, Omar

21.
Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

22.
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
Levi-Strauss, Claude

23.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
Lawrence, D. H.

24.
A book should be luminous not voluminous.
Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Woolf, Virginia

26.
Let's face it, writing is hell.
Styron, William

27.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Steinem, Gloria

28.
For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no r?gime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

29.
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

30.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
Maugham, W. Somerset

31.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
Wilde, Oscar

32.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
White, Elwyn Brooks

33.
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
Golding, William

34.
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
Byron, Lord

35.
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

36.
A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

37.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Borges, Jorge Luis

38.
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

39.
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

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.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Hemingway, Ernest

42.
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Ferber, Edna

43.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Fadiman, Clifton

44.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Joyce, James

45.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
Faulkner, William

46.
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

47.
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

48.
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

49.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Goodman, Ellen

50.
Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.
Steinbeck, John


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