Top 100 A Writer Quotes
#1. Like a warrior in the battlefield, a writer must endeavour to use his pen to stamp the paper with his identity.
Ogwo David Emenike
#2. You want an audience. If you didn't, you wouldn't be a writer. The biggest motivation to write is the knowledge that someone will read it.
Andy Weir
#3. To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be?
Anne Lamott
#4. If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
Margaret Atwood
#5. I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.
Robert Morgan
#6. I don't know what it must be like to be a writer in general, but to be a comedy writer, it's got to be something - it's a very special kind of talent.
Edie Falco
#7. My evolution as a writer? Mother said "stop talking like that", teachers said "you're weird", readers say "best book ever
Daniel Marques
#8. Yes, I will be a writer and make all of you live again in my words.
Carlos Bulosan
#9. My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
Jane Hirshfield
#10. A writer writes
regardless ...
even though ...
notwithstanding ...
despite ...
at any rate ...
anyhow ...
nevertheless ...
in the face of ...
undeterred by ...
heedless of ...
and because.
The true writer simply continues to write.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#11. A writer of any merit does not worry about being accepted everywhere. He must write to inspire, to change for the better or to challenge the status quo!
Avijeet Das
#12. For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
Russell Banks
#13. I'm not naturally an extrovert. I'm a writer - I sit in a room by myself making things up. That is where I'm happiest.
Paula Hawkins
#14. As a writer, as a creator, I'm giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain't got to pry beyond that.
Frank Ocean
#15. A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.
George Edward Woodberry
#16. A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.
Francois Mauriac
#17. By not foretelling the ending to yourself, as a writer, you're able to open up the canvas and say, "I'm going to go here. I'm going to go there." It's just a little bit more freeing than a stand-alone procedural, where you work backwards from the end.
Veena Sud
#18. Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.
John O'Hara
#19. I think everyone should pursue their dreams. Whether you want to play football, act, sing, become a writer or whatever you have burning inside you as you're growing up, you should pursue it.
Tom Hiddleston
#20. Robin Buss is a writer and translator who contributes regularly to The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and other papers.
Alexandre Dumas
#21. Never underestimate the narcissism of a writer.
Elia Kazan
#22. A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#23. The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.
Harlan Coben
#24. If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying.
Jaroslav Seifert
#25. I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.
Tim Cahill
#26. The greatest thing about being in a band, and the strength of having companionship and collaboration, is also the thing that makes a band break up because then you begin to feel confined. Like, who am I as an individual, as a writer, as a performer?
Karen Fairchild
#27. For me to get to work with a writer-director over time in developing a project - my investment feels much more profound. I know that whatever is on the other end I'm going to feel that much closer to.
Maggie Siff
#28. It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.
Naguib Mahfouz
#29. If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.
Jennifer Weiner
#31. There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.
John Updike
#32. If I believed people who told me you can't make a living as a writer, I wouldn't be making a living as a writer.
William Meikle
#33. Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#34. I actually was a writer who had the ability to perform his own work as opposed to a comedian who wrote his own material. So that really made me happy and changed my whole perspective.
George Carlin
#35. I love writing on trains. The joy of being a writer is it's all in your head; you don't need materials apart from the laptop. It's like taking your work home with you, so you can feel grounded in your own insane writerly realities wherever you are.
Sadie Jones
#36. In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman's marriage, coincided with Woolf 's most productive years as a writer.
Jane Goldman
#37. I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.
Marie Rutkoski
#38. All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that's why you become a writer.
Mark Billingham
#39. I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
Aleksandar Hemon
#40. I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
Sharon Olds
#41. Be careful what you say and do around a writer; your words and actions may become material.
A.D. Posey
#42. 'Between Shades of Gray' is a story of astonishing force. I feel grateful for a writer like Ruta Sepetys who bravely tells the hard story of what happens to the innocent when world leaders and their minions choose hate and oppression. Beautiful and unforgettable.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
#43. A writer's courage: to leave a blank page blank.
Marty Rubin
#44. The cool thing about my show and me is that I'm a writer, and I'm a writer first if I don't have music.
Halsey
#45. Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
William Zinsser
#46. A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#47. I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.
Kate Christensen
#48. I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.
Jerry Pournelle
#49. A semicolon is where a writer can choose to end the sentence," she said, tucking a lock of brown hair behind her ear. "But they don't. The story goes on. It's a symbol of hope. To keep going." She smiled tremulously. "Sometimes I need that reminder.
Emma Scott
#50. I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people.
Hector Tobar
#51. Most don't live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas.
Lynn Coady
#52. Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.
Joe Dante
#53. I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
Colin Wilson
#54. But as a writer and performer, I want to get paid for what I do.
Debbie Harry
#55. I am a writer ... a master of words.'Like a knife, words should be handled carefully. They can cut deeply, the wound may never heal, and the scar can remain for an eternity.
Ey Wade
#56. A writer has only three tools: language, experience and imagination.
Mark Rubinstein
#57. The journey as a writer is not so much about our stories, but the stories of others we meet along the way on our wonderful path. #grateful
Lee Bice-Matheson
#58. When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.
Paulo Coelho
#59. Truthful and loyal. A writer has no obligation to be either, but should choose one less one be chosen for her or him.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
#60. I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'
Ursula K. Le Guin
#61. Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Eudora Welty
#62. Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
Annie Dillard
#64. Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.
Hugh Leonard
#65. You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
Truman Capote
#66. I knew I wanted to be a writer. Where I came from, no one was a writer. I came from Long Island, and everyone became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a teacher or a businessman. I didn't know any writers.
Howard Gordon
#67. The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired.
I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day.
Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.
Jonathan Maas
#68. I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
Alexander Chee
#69. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
Joy Williams
#70. I have more to say as a writer than from behind a wok.
Eddie Huang
#71. In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
Nadine Gordimer
#72. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff on TV. I feel much more optimistic about TV than I do about movies. There will always be good movies but I think, for the most part, it's always going to be a huge fight to get those movies made. TV is the best place to be as a writer, I think.
Alan Ball
#73. A writer needs solitude : moments that he can spend in introspection and in reflection. These moments make him pensive and thoughtful and help him write his thoughts with clarity. A life of devotion to one's passion gives us meaning to our life.
Avijeet Das
#74. As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.
Tate Taylor
#75. There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot ... I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.
Phyllis A. Whitney
#76. She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.
David Benioff
#77. A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.
Walter Kirn
#78. Plath was a feminist, in a broad sense of the term: she never undervalued herself or her work. She insisted that she be recognized as the talented writer she was even while her children were infants and she was spending more time as a mother and a wife than as a writer.
Linda Wagner-Martin
#79. It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.
Andrea Hirata
#80. Basically, I'm a writer. I'm the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.
Mel Brooks
#81. Writing is not always a writer's playtime. It's actually a work in progress. Few understand this and mistakenly believe we're wasting time. But it's never a waste of time when doing what you love.
David Lucero
#82. Being a writer is like being pregnant - you either are or you aren't.
L.E. Truscott
#83. You know you're a writer when you wish you could meet your characters and hang out with them.
Kerry Frith
#84. I like to think I grow as a writer from every new experience.
Jason Aaron
#85. I started as a writer; I started writing when I was little. The acting and directing was an outgrowth of my desire to tell stories.
Mike White
#86. As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don't.
Dani Shapiro
#87. The acting is something that will always be a part of my life, but the writing gives me a lot more creative freedom. You're a pawn in somebody else's chess game, whereas as a writer and as a director, you get to call the shots. And that's very thrilling.
Amber Benson
#88. Everyone to me has to pick a subject to talk about in music if you're going to be a writer.
Barry White
#89. I love the village in my computer. There's little validation in the day-to-day life of a writer; sometimes we ache for a connection.
Lisa Unger
#90. The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
#91. By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.
Sarah Silverman
#92. Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.
Walter Jon Williams
#93. To be a writer, a creative person, you must retain your ability to react uniquely. Your feelings must remain your own. The day you mute yourself, or moderate yourself, or repress your proneness to get excited or ecstatic or angry or emotionally involved ... that day, you die as a writer.
Dwight V. Swain
#94. When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.
David Guterson
#96. I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.
Richard Powers
#97. A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#98. I always wanted to be a writer but everyone kept telling me it was impossible to break into the field or make money. I've proven them wrong on both counts.
Barbara Hambly
#99. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.
Chuck Klosterman
#100. (Everywhere I go as a writer - especially if I'm in drag as a "memoirist" - such fears seem to be first and foremost on people's minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.)
Maggie Nelson
