A Writers Quotes

#1. Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

Lynn Abbey

#2. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

Dinaw Mengestu

#3. All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

Jesse Kellerman

#4. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

Mark Slouka

#5. Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.

Fay Weldon

#6. This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.

Patrick Rothfuss

#7. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

#8. Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

Martin Amis

#9. The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

Colin Wilson

#10. The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'

Roger Ebert

#11. Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.

Chris Campanioni

#12. Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.

Murray Gell-Mann

#13. Writers without readers is like a doctor without patients.

Britt Holewinski

#14. I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

Anna Quindlen

#15. Like all writers, my greatest inspiration, my ultimate muse, is a deadline.

Dave Barry

#16. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

George Orwell

#17. A humorist is a writer who's not funny enough to call themselves a comedian.

Dan Alatorre

#18. It is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or acknowledge the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake.

Henry David Thoreau

#19. Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.

Erin McKean

#20. I'm not talented or gifted. I'm a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.

Jessie Snow

#21. I only work with a couple of co-writers who I'm really close with, so they always know what's going on in my life and we talk about things openly, they know every song is true to something that I'm either going through or have gone through before.

LIZ

#22. If I sneezed, writers' vitals would spew out my nose like bats from a cave mouth, fiery balls from a roman candle, water from an open fire hydrant.

Dennis Vickers

#23. Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

Stanley Schmidt

#24. The radical rightwing pegs Hollywood as a leftist town, which is completely wrong. There are a lot of actors, writers, and directors who talk a liberal agenda ... but all the studio bosses, for as long as there have been studios, have all been as far rightwing as you can possibly imagine.

Paul Haggis

#25. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Honore De Balzac

#26. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Don DeLillo

#27. If you take 'Cheers' and 'Seinfeld' and watch the early shows, they're kind of awkward. It took a while for the writers and everything to gel.

Amanda Peet

#28. I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

Kurt Vonnegut

#29. All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

Haniel Long

#30. Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.

Dan Alatorre

#31. For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL

Michelle M. Pillow

#32. I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

Clive Barker

#33. I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more.

Garry Hynes

#34. But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.

Sean Hayes

#35. So when it was my turn to start developing projects, I knew the writers I wanted to work with, and I had met every head of studio, every executive and a lot of producers. I started finding things, little crumbs off other people's tables that I would make my own.

Rupert Sanders

#36. Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

#37. I consider 'White Collar' my home base. I'm so lucky to get to play a character that's very multifaceted and the writers take risks on and never get into a staid process with.

Matt Bomer

#38. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.

Jenim Dibie

#39. A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#40. Do you remember the time, Mike," Jeremy laughed, "that you put a banana down your pants and walked up to the Palma-nator. It looked like you had one hell of a hard-on.

Buffy Andrews

#41. If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.

Jim Rash

#42. There are a lot of people in this country who really like my writing. And a lot of writers respect me. But the so-called establishment? They hate me.

Hubert Selby Jr.

#43. The aspiration of all writers should be to avoid leaving fissures in their work, to make sure that everything is properly secured so readers won't find a single toehold for their suspicions.

Marcos Giralt Torrente

#44. I look for strong people. I don't like people who'll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that's reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to 'The Standard.'

Anna Wintour

#45. I don't think writers -in general- ever achieve the fame of movie stars. For the simple reason that only a fraction of the population reads. But I guess there are exceptions.

Augusten Burroughs

#46. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker

#47. Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.

Julian Barnes

#48. I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

Ted Chiang

#49. To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

William Gibson

#50. A poet's words are like mortar to the bricks of society.

Jason E. Hodges

#51. Here's the bottom line; writers write. Sometimes words flow easily. Sometimes it's like sloughing through mud. Either way a professional writer keeps writing.

P.C. Cast

#52. I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.

Garrison Keillor

#53. There is only one person who needs to be convinced that you're a writer. That would be you.

Tim Campbell

#54. The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

Blaise Pascal

#55. A step taken to a new idea is a step taken to a new world!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#56. An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer?

Jason Lutes

#57. It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

Helen Macdonald

#58. At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

Bernard Cornwell

#59. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
-Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, II

Denise Gigante

#60. There's no path to being a writer that's applicable to everyone. Some young writers have the fortitude to work in a vacuum. For me, it was important to have some sense that my failures weren't unique.

Jonathan Dee

#61. Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.

Siri Hustvedt

#62. Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

Robert Morgan

#63. A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

Tom Robbins

#64. Two easy steps to be a good writer:
1. Don't write what everyone is writing.
2. Write what everyone is trying to write.

Himanshu Chhabra

#65. He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.

Brenda Sutton Rose

#66. Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing.

Gil Gerard

#67. The writers of religious scriptures and texts would have done humanity a grand service if they would have used just one sentence, in one of the pages out of the thousands, to support respectful and peaceful disagreement.

Steve Maraboli

#68. It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

Julian Barnes

#69. Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

Ernst Pawel

#70. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.

Chris Campanioni

#71. A good writer is one you can read without breaking a sweat.

Patricia T. O'Conner

#72. What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.

Fennel Hudson

#73. My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

Henry Louis Gates

#74. I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.

Italo Calvino

#75. Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

Sara Sheridan

#76. I read about writers' lives with the fascination of one slowing down to get a good look at an automobile accident.

Kaye Gibbons

#77. A writer is nothing without a reader; a reader is nothing without a writer.

Anthony Liccione

#78. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Thomas Bernhard

#79. Don't be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable. For sketch writers, remember they're called sketches for a reason. They're not called oil paintings. Some of them are going to stink. You have to let them stink.

Tina Fey

#80. It's part of the business of really not caring about topping myself because I really don't care what's going to happen. I think just surviving is a major thing. I'd like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect.

Rod Serling

#81. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.

Michelle Tea

#82. You may give up your big dream and that is very hard! If necessary, give it up but then create a new one! Never live without big dreams because they will keep you alive in life!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#83. The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

Milan Kundera

#84. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)

Bernard Malamud

#85. There's nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn't in their books. It's better to read a good writer than meet one.

John Irving

#86. I'd often mused that writers and doctors were similar people. We all had God complexes and liked control. The only thing that separated us was a lot of schooling and science classes. And the fact that the people whose lives I messed with weren't real.

Chelsea M. Cameron

#87. When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.

Dani Shapiro

#88. I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

Mark Haddon

#89. I don't watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when you're alone and someone's voice is coming through their work. There's a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more.

Dylan Moran

#90. An excellent precept for writers: Have a clear idea of all the phrases and expressions you need, and you will find them.

Ximenes Doudan

#91. Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.

Hanif Kureishi

#92. All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

G.K. Chesterton

#93. Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.

Joe Queenan

#94. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

Margaret Atwood

#95. Completing any writing project, particularly a novel, is a daunting prospect. Many people become frozen by the prospect. Others keep waiting for the right time. Some wait for the spark of inspiration. Even experienced writers find it is easier to do anything other than actually write.

Bob Mayer

#96. Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

Ethan Canin

#97. Solitude is not a port to drop anchor, but only a port to rest for a while!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#98. Only the scenario writers are exempt. These are tied between the tails of two spirited Caucasian ponies, which are then driven off in opposite directions. This custom is called a conference.

S.J Perelman

#99. A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Susan Sontag

#100. Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

Bonnie Jo Campbell