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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Ellman, Lucy

2.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Nabokov, Vladimir

3.
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
Levi-Strauss, Claude

4.
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

5.
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

6.
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Kesey, Ken

7.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
Sackville-West, Vita

8.
Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.
Edel, Leon

9.
I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Hemingway, Ernest

10.
You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.
Horace

11.
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.

12.
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

13.
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.
Bronte, Charlotte

14.
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

15.
Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

16.
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
Orwell, George

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.
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

19.
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
Khayyam, Omar

20.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Hemingway, Ernest

21.
A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.
Hutchens, John K.

22.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
Baldwin, James

23.
A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
Miller, Henry

24.
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis

25.
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Dahlberg, Edward

26.
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

27.
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Burgess, Anthony

28.
Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.
Dennis, Patrick

29.
The walls are the publishers of the poor.
Galeano, Eduardo

30.
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Pinter, Harold

31.
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

32.
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

33.
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

34.
If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.
Pascal, Blaise

35.
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

36.
Good writing is clear thinking made visible.
Wheeler, Bill

37.
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
Mortimer, John

38.
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.
Porter, Cole

39.
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

40.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Auden, W. H.

41.
The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.
Leon, Inigo de

42.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Bach, Richard

43.
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

44.
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.

45.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Naipaul, V. S.

46.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Fadiman, Clifton

47.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Pound, Ezra

48.
Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.
Morrison, Edmund

49.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

50.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall


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