Being A Great Writer Quotes

#1. Being a great writer is not the same as writing great.

John Updike

#2. I love being a writer. I have a great life. I get up in the morning and pad around in my dressing gown and listen to Radio 4.

John Niven

#3. Being a writer is something I love to do, plus I get independence. It's a great job for a woman because she can work at home and always be there for the children.

Anne Mather

#4. Being a good writer meant he could make a living and do as he chose. Being a great one would bring responsibilities and expectations he had no desire to face.

Nora Roberts

#5. There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist.

Rebecca Makkai

#6. Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don't think I'd enjoy being in the same room with him. He's not my kind of person.

Joe Haldeman

#7. I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody.

Sam Shepard

#8. The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer.

Julie Powell

#9. What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

Norman Mailer

#10. I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become.

Amelie Nothomb

#11. Being a good observer is a great tool to have as a writer, just taking the world in.

Lauren Conrad

#12. The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Graham Greene

#13. It's great being a part time writer. If you sell books you're a success. But if you don't sell any then all you have to say is " writing is just an amusing hobby".

Aaron T. Knight

#14. It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well.

Richard Hell

#15. Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.

Tucker Max

#16. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

Nick Flynn

#17. I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun.

George Saunders

#18. Being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody. Whereas, as an actor, you have to audition or wait for somebody else to make a decision about how to use you, with writing, you can do it anywhere, anytime you want. You don't have to ask permission.

Sam Shepard

#19. But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

Lytton Strachey

#20. You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

Nick Hornby

#21. People should think that being a writer is cool. Even if you're just a starving writer. Besides, most great writers were starving at one point or another. It comes with the title.

Zack Love

#22. I tell my students, if you're interested in marine biology or llama farming, follow that string. Yes, it will probably take you a longer time to write that book, but it's not a race. That's another great thing about being a writer: you don't age out.

Debra Dean

#23. Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

Jodi Picoult

#24. My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.

Pat Conroy

#25. The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.

Martin Cruz Smith

#26. When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation.

Jude Law

#27. I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.

Walter Cronkite

#28. Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.

David Mamet

#29. As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.

Dinaw Mengestu

#30. Being a writer is great, and being a parent is great, and I hate Marching Band.

MaryJanice Davidson