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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
- Kraus, Karl
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
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

2.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Didion, Joan

3.
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

4.
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Disraeli, Benjamin

5.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

6.
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
La Bruyere, Jean De

7.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Zinsser, William

8.
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Bachelard, Gaston

9.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

10.
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

11.
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

12.
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

13.
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.

14.
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

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

16.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
Thurber, James

17.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
Lawrence, D. H.

18.
No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.
Trocchi, Alexander

19.
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Wilde, Oscar

20.
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold

21.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
Mencken, H. L.

22.
A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.
Nunn, Gregory

23.
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Hemingway, Ernest

24.
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

25.
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
Herford, Oliver

26.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.
Benchley, Robert

27.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
Faulkner, William

28.
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

29.
I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.
Russell, Bertrand

30.
Good writing is clear thinking made visible.
Wheeler, Bill

31.
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
Smith, Nancy Banks

32.
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Kesey, Ken

33.
I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.
Johnson, Samuel

34.
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Chandler, Raymond

35.
What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.
Stone, Robert

36.
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

37.
Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.
Sollers, Philippe

38.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Woolf, Virginia

39.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Fadiman, Clifton

40.
As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
Twain, Mark

41.
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

42.
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

43.
Writing is a craft not an art.
Zinsser, William

44.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Steinbeck, John

45.
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

46.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Donleavy, J. P.

47.
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.

48.
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.

49.
What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
Dahlberg, Edward

50.
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
Zinsser, William


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