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Writers and writing

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.
Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes
Writers and writing Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Writers and writing

1.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
Faulkner, William

2.
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Pinter, Harold

3.
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

4.
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

5.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
Baldwin, James

6.
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Burgess, Anthony

7.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Woolf, Virginia

8.
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

9.
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

10.
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
Duncan, Isadora

11.
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
Nicolson, Harold

12.
Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
Doren, Carl Van

13.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
Maugham, W. Somerset

14.
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one -- and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
Vidal, Gore

15.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
Handke, Peter

16.
How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.
Dyer, Wayne

17.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
Faulkner, William

18.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
Donleavy, J. P.

19.
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

20.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Borges, Jorge Luis

21.
Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean back ward trying -- only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

22.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Auden, W. H.

23.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Franklin, Benjamin

24.
A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

25.
It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
Anderson, Margaret

26.
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

27.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
Maugham, W. Somerset

28.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Walker, Alice

29.
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

30.
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Ferber, Edna

31.
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

32.
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

33.
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.

34.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Hemingway, Ernest

35.
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

36.
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Lewis, Cecil Day

38.
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

39.
As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.
Synge, J. M.

40.
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

41.
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.
Porter, Cole

42.
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
Socrates

43.
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

44.
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
White, Elwyn Brooks

45.
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

46.
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

47.
The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.
Maurois, Andre

48.
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Rushdie, Salman

49.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
Maugham, W. Somerset

50.
Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
Sagan, Francoise


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