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Writers and writing

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
- Kesey, Ken
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.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Woolf, Virginia

3.
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

4.
Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
Meyer, Paul J.

5.
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Marx, Groucho

6.
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

7.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
Thurber, James

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.
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

10.
Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
Doren, Carl Van

11.
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

12.
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.

13.
Great writers are the saints for the godless.
Brookner, Anita

14.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Byron, Lord

15.
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.

16.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Joyce, James

17.
The walls are the publishers of the poor.
Galeano, Eduardo

18.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

19.
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

20.
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.

21.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Hemingway, Ernest

22.
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

23.
There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.
Crowley, Aleister

24.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
Wilde, Oscar

26.
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

27.
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Disraeli, Benjamin

28.
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

29.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Rushdie, Salman

30.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Paz, Octavio

31.
Let's face it, writing is hell.
Styron, William

32.
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

33.
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

34.
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
Mortimer, John

35.
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
Blanchot, Maurice

36.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
Baldwin, James

37.
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

38.
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

39.
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold

40.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

41.
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

42.
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

43.
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

44.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
Maugham, W. Somerset

45.
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.

46.
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

47.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Mailer, Norman

48.
If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

49.
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

50.
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


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