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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
Landor, Walter Savage

2.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
White, Elwyn Brooks

3.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Forster, Edward M.

4.
It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
Anderson, Margaret

5.
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
La Bruyere, Jean De

6.
This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.
Kraus, Karl

7.
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

8.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
Faulkner, William

9.
Writing is thinking on paper.
Zinsser, William

10.
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

11.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Steinem, Gloria

12.
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

13.
Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
Vizinczey, Stephen

14.
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Burgess, Anthony

15.
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

16.
When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.
Connolly, Cyril

17.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Joyce, James

18.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Fadiman, Clifton

19.
The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.
Pascal, Blaise

20.
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

21.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Woolf, Virginia

22.
A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
Gribbon, George

23.
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.

24.
The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
Man, Paul De

25.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Paz, Octavio

26.
Great writers are the saints for the godless.
Brookner, Anita

27.
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.

28.
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

29.
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Disraeli, Benjamin

30.
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

31.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Benchley, Robert

32.
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

33.
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
Connolly, Cyril

34.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Butler, Samuel

35.
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.
Havel, Vaclav

36.
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.

37.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Naipaul, V. S.

38.
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

39.
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

40.
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
Duncan, Isadora

41.
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

42.
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
Hemingway, Ernest

43.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Steinbeck, John

44.
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
Ruskin, John

45.
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
Rosten, Leo

46.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
Baldwin, James

47.
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

48.
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

49.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Connolly, Cyril

50.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Hemingway, Ernest


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