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Writers and writing

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
- Ellman, Lucy
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
Vidal, Gore

2.
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Ellman, Lucy

3.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Zinsser, William

4.
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

5.
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

6.
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
Smith, Nancy Banks

7.
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

8.
Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
James, William

9.
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.

10.
Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
Corbett, James J.

11.
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

12.
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

13.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Raine, Craig

14.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Goodman, Ellen

15.
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

16.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
Amis, Martin

17.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Borges, Jorge Luis

18.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
White, Elwyn Brooks

19.
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
Shaw, Irwin

20.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Handke, Peter

21.
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

22.
Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

23.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Rushdie, Salman

24.
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

25.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Canetti, Elias

26.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

27.
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

28.
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.

29.
A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
Hutchens, John K.

30.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Fadiman, Clifton

31.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
Lawrence, D. H.

32.
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

33.
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Marx, Groucho

34.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Didion, Joan

35.
The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
Man, Paul De

36.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Mailer, Norman

37.
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

38.
Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.
Swift, Jonathan

39.
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

40.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
Maugham, W. Somerset

41.
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

42.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
Baldwin, James

43.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
Wilde, Oscar

44.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Pound, Ezra

45.
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

46.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
Mencken, H. L.

47.
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

48.
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

49.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Auden, W. H.

50.
To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.
Barthes, Roland


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