George Orwell Quotes

For me, writing in English is not an easy task.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

Find something you like, go into a room, close the door and read it aloud. Read it aloud. Everybody in the world who likes dance can see dance, or hear music, or see art, or admire architecture - but everybody in the world uses words who is not a recluse or mute. But the writer has to take these most common things, more common than musical notes or dance positions, a writer has to take some adverbs, and verbs and nouns and ball them up together and make them bounce.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

Great trouble breeds great art, I think.

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Writing is something I took up rather than anything I had an inclination toward. I like acting -delivering someone else's message - but writing is more of an accomplishment.

Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.

To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity.

I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.