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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
- Rushdie, Salman
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
Smith, Nancy Banks

2.
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

3.
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

4.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Nabokov, Vladimir

5.
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

6.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
Faulkner, William

7.
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
Miller, Olin

8.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Zinsser, William

9.
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Ferber, Edna

10.
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.

11.
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

12.
Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.
Smith, Dr. Walter

13.
He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.
Boileau, Nicholas

14.
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
Crisp, Quentin

15.
I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.
Pirandello, Luigi

16.
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

17.
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
Aldiss, Brian

18.
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

19.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Steinem, Gloria

20.
To write is a humiliation.
Dahlberg, Edward

21.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
Baldwin, James

22.
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.

23.
A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
Gribbon, George

24.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
Faulkner, William

25.
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

26.
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.

27.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Woolf, Virginia

28.
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
Orwell, George

29.
As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
Twain, Mark

30.
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
La Bruyere, Jean De

31.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Fadiman, Clifton

32.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Kraus, Karl

33.
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

34.
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
Doctorow, E. L.

35.
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
Rice, Anne

36.
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

37.
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.

38.
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

39.
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

40.
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

41.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Forster, Edward M.

42.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
Maugham, W. Somerset

43.
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.

44.
What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
Rascoe, Burton

45.
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Ellman, Lucy

46.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Bowen, Catherine Drinker

47.
The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
Landor, Walter Savage

48.
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Kesey, Ken

49.
They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Hellman, Lillian

50.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Benchley, Robert


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