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Motivational Quotes

Writers and writing

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
- Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
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

2.
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

3.
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
Duncan, Isadora

4.
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

5.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Paz, Octavio

6.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
Thurber, James

7.
Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
Ellman, Lucy

8.
Writing is a craft not an art.
Zinsser, William

9.
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

10.
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

11.
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Smith, Logan Pearsall

12.
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

13.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Pound, Ezra

14.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Auden, W. H.

15.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
Wilde, Oscar

16.
If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Bagehot, Walter

18.
I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork.
Vries, Peter De

19.
The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.
Pascal, Blaise

20.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Naipaul, V. S.

21.
If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.
Parker, Dorothy

22.
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
O'Connor, Flannery

23.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Rushdie, Salman

24.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Zinsser, William

25.
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
Maugham, W. Somerset

26.
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
Zinsser, William

27.
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

28.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Joyce, James

29.
The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
Sand, George

30.
Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to your desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

31.
An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Disraeli, Benjamin

32.
If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

33.
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Cather, Willa

34.
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

35.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

36.
Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.
Sollers, Philippe

37.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

38.
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
Wilder, Thornton

39.
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

40.
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

41.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
Faulkner, William

42.
Easy writings curse is hard reading.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

43.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Hemingway, Ernest

44.
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

45.
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.

46.
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.

47.
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
Cather, Willa

48.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
Thurber, James

49.
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

50.
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Brooks, Mel


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