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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
- Lawrence, D. H.
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
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

2.
As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
Twain, Mark

3.
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
Rice, Anne

4.
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
Mcmurtry, Larry

5.
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.
Horace

6.
Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
Doren, Carl Van

7.
Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.
Swift, Jonathan

8.
Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.
Smith, Dr. Walter

9.
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Pinter, Harold

10.
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

11.
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Hemingway, Ernest

12.
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
Blanchot, Maurice

13.
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

14.
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Bagehot, Walter

15.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
Mencken, H. L.

16.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Naipaul, V. S.

17.
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

18.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Bowen, Catherine Drinker

19.
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

20.
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Vorse, Mary Heaton

21.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Freud, Sigmund

22.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Hemingway, Ernest

23.
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
Benchley, Robert

24.
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

25.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Auden, W. H.

26.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence. The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Pope, Alexander

27.
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

28.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Benchley, Robert

29.
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Dahlberg, Edward

30.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
Thurber, James

31.
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

32.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

33.
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

34.
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

35.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Goodman, Ellen

36.
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

37.
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.
Wilde, Oscar

38.
A book should be luminous not voluminous.
Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.
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

40.
I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
Lawrence, D. H.

41.
A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
Gribbon, George

42.
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Disraeli, Benjamin

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

44.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
Faulkner, William

45.
Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
Meyer, Paul J.

46.
Great writers are the saints for the godless.
Brookner, Anita

47.
Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
Corbett, James J.

48.
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.
Porter, Cole

49.
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

50.
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


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