Writers And Writing Quotes - Page 4

• The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Writing, Two, Familiar

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• Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

  Moliere

  Love, Funny, Money

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• I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

  Steve Martin

  Funny, Writing, Humor

  FaceBook post by Steve Martin from Feb 29, 2012

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• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Education, Teacher, Women

  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose "The Nature and Aims of Fiction" (1969)

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• I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

  James A. Michener

  Writing, World, Want

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• One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.

  Niyi Osundare

  Writing, Sleep, Obsession

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• If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.

  J. B. Priestley

  Writing, Odds, Challenges

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• All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

  George Orwell

  Selfish, Lying, Writing

  1946 'Why I Write'.

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• If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.

  Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien

  Writing, Character, Emotional

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• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Beautiful, Book

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.8, Penguin

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• Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

  Norman Mailer

  Book, Writing, Men

  1965 'Mr Mailer Interviews Himself', in the NewYork Times Book Review,17 Sep.

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• Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

  Samuel Johnson

  Science, Belief, Favourite

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• If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

  Anais Nin

  Writing, Commitment, Culture

  "Woman as Writer" by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, (p. 38), 1978.

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• It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

  C. J. Cherryh

  Writing, Long, Garbage

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• People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

  Harlan Ellison

  Morning, Writing, Thinking

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• I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Writing, Successful, Interesting

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• If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing, Perfect, Writers Block

  FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from May 05, 2014

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• Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

  Orson Scott Card

  Writing, Past, Ideas

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• Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Story Writers, Details

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• Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Writing, Hands, Ashamed

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.233, Penguin

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• The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

  Anais Nin

  Inspirational Life, Memorable, Writing

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• Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Writing, Ambitious, Rough Drafts

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• It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

  William Faulkner

  Moving, Writing, Character

  William Faulkner, Joseph L. Fant, Robert Paul Ashley (1964). “Faulkner at West Point”, p.101, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

  J. P. Donleavy

  Writing, Worst Moments, Writing Fiction

  Quoted in Playboy, May 1979

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• Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sex, Writing, Literature

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “Little Wilson and Big God”, p.173, Random House

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