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Writers and writing

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
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
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

2.
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

3.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
Goodman, Ellen

4.
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

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

7.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
White, Elwyn Brooks

8.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

9.
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

10.
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

11.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
Faulkner, William

12.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Rushdie, Salman

13.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Zinsser, William

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

16.
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

17.
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

18.
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

19.
If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
Asimov, Isaac

20.
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

21.
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

22.
The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.
Leon, Inigo de

23.
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
Sauser, Blaise Cendrars

24.
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
James, Henry

25.
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

26.
The walls are the publishers of the poor.
Galeano, Eduardo

27.
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.

28.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Steinbeck, John

29.
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

30.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Fadiman, Clifton

31.
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.
Bagnold, Enid

32.
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
Sontag, Susan

33.
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.

34.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Dahlberg, Edward

35.
Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.
Sollers, Philippe

36.
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.

37.
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

38.
What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.
Strindberg, J. August

39.
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

40.
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.

41.
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.

42.
Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.
Dennis, Patrick

43.
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
Michener, James A.

44.
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
Rice, Anne

45.
The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
Sand, George

46.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Nabokov, Vladimir

47.
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Ferber, Edna

48.
A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.
Gribbon, George

49.
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

50.
Let's face it, writing is hell.
Styron, William


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