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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Bowen, Catherine Drinker

2.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Hellman, Lillian

3.
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
Zinsser, William

4.
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

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

7.
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
Yeats, William Butler

8.
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

9.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Hemingway, Ernest

10.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Hemingway, Ernest

11.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Benchley, Robert

12.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Forster, Edward M.

13.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
Thurber, James

14.
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

15.
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
Miller, Henry

16.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

17.
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
Algren, Nelson

18.
The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.
Nemerov, Howard

19.
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Disraeli, Benjamin

20.
Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

21.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Naipaul, V. S.

22.
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

23.
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.
Horace

24.
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.

25.
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold

26.
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

27.
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
Miller, Olin

28.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Nabokov, Vladimir

29.
Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
Morrison, Toni

30.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Raine, Craig

31.
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Ellman, Lucy

32.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Canetti, Elias

33.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Woolf, Virginia

34.
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

35.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Handke, Peter

36.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Joyce, James

37.
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
Hemingway, Ernest

38.
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

39.
The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.
Fowler, Gene

40.
Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
Corbett, James J.

41.
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.

42.
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

43.
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

44.
If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

45.
Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.
Swift, Jonathan

46.
Easy writings curse is hard reading.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

47.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
Auden, W. H.

48.
It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
La Bruyere, Jean De

49.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Didion, Joan

50.
There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.
Crowley, Aleister


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