Top 100 Best Writers Quotes
#2. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
Linwood Barclay
#3. Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#4. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
P.D. James
#5. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#6. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
Anthony Burgess
#7. I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
Christy Hall
#8. Oh, I'm going to miss everything. It's been the most amazing and significant job of my life obviously and I'll always have it near and dear to my heart. I'm so grateful and appreciative that I worked with the best crew and the best writers and producers and cast and I love them all.
Alyson Hannigan
#9. No shame in having a ghostwriter," Storm said. "Some of the best books published every year are penned by talented writers whose identity the public will never know.
Richard Castle
#10. 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
#11. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.
Robert Black
#12. People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
Cheryl Strayed
#13. The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.
Edgar Allan Poe
#14. James Patterson, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, so far these are the best horror writers, but I will continue searching for other interesting horror and twisted writers even like James Wan.
Deyth Banger
#15. You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.
M.J. Rose
#16. The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
#17. The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that's the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.
R.D. Ronald
#18. When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.
Daniel Kehlmann
#19. Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the whole world, and an entire sprawling industry, that writing monsters and demons and end-of-the-world is not hack-work, it can challenge the best. Joss Whedon raised the bar for every writer - not just genre/niche writers, but every single one of us.
Russell T. Davies
#22. TRIGGER CITY secures Sean Chercover's place as one of the best crime writers of his generation. It grabs you hard on the first page and doesn't let go, even after you've closed the book.
Tasha Alexander
#23. The greatest writers have no purpose but to incite in the minds of each reader the highest and best thought of which they are capable.
Dee Hock
#24. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#25. Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.
Robert Boswell
#26. I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.
Rupert Sanders
#27. For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
Hilary Mantel
#29. You can make anything into a play for the simple reason that the human mind is one of the best writers in the business. So, if you've got a writer who's clever enough to give you enough clues, you will fill out every blank spot in a play, every single one.
Morgan Freeman
#30. The greatest gift you can leave to humanity is the beautiful trace you left behind yourself that invites people to reason, science and peace!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#32. Psychopaths are odd and rare and unique by themself... if they were writers, I bet in one that they will be the best...
Deyth Banger
#33. Growing up, my mom was a painter, my best friend was a painter, my husband is a painter. For a long time I knew artists, and I didn't know any writers.
Holly Black
#34. I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work - one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#35. I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the war.
Roger Waters
#36. It's also interesting to notice that most of the best Finnish speculative writers are women.
Toni Jerrman
#37. Every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word.
Adam Langer
#38. Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst
Susan Cheever
#39. Sometimes the writer has to learn the hard way of creating a bad work to become a best-seller yet doesn't surrender to the negative where other writers will.
Millicent Ashby
#40. It happens to all writers, all artists, they can live beyond their best work and carry on with disappointment and mediocrity.
Chloe Thurlow
#41. The best writers are usually the most voracious & diverse readers!
C.S. Dixon
#42. I don't generally publicly respond to
reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers' responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.
China Mieville
#43. All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.
Virginia Woolf
#44. The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
#45. Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.
Goldwin Smith
#46. Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer?
A: Explaining what that is.
Christy Hall
#47. All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.
Carla H. Krueger
#49. All writers steal. You might as well steal from the best.
Simon Toyne
#50. I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
John Irving
#51. [Uncentering the Earth] itself is uncentering in the best possible way. Vollmann is one of the deepest, most fully ensouled writers alive.
David Foster Wallace
#52. Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write." (p.136)
Mark David Gerson
#53. My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.
Chuck Palahniuk
#54. It also seems that the unhappy writers are the enduring writer. Hampered or limited by their suffering, literature becomes their focus and salvation, forcing them to give their best every moment of creation. Writing becomes their medicine, their way of escape, the catalyst for their imagination.
Cirilo F. Bautista
#55. I'm a Best-Selling author and humorist; my brother points out that a humorist is a writer who's not funny enough to call themselves a comedian. Gotta love family.
Dan Alatorre
#56. I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.
Christopher Fowler
#57. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
Raymond Chandler
#58. Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.
John Irving
#60. A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you.
John Steinbeck
#61. The best writers were philosophers who wrapped their commentary about life in laughter.
Dick Van Dyke
#62. Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.
Charles Bukowski
#63. Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.
Michael Chabon
#64. I don't think I ever got the hang of the writers' room. I love collaborating with people, but I really do my best work alone, and I think I would want to - if I did something again, I think I'd want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does.
Diablo Cody
#65. Not every classic book was the best thing ever. Each book has flaws, and it's up to writers to change things.
Tim Holtorf
#66. It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. The best writing is embarrassing; that's all there is to it.
A.D. Posey
#68. Other writers, producers, and directors of low-budget films would often put down the film they were making, saying it was just something to make money with. I never felt that. If I took the assignment, I'd give it my best shot.
Roger Corman
#69. The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.
Jose Padilha
#70. Bravery isn't brandishing a sword. It's standing your moral ground and letting others try their best to take you down.
Carla H. Krueger
#71. There are many sources of happiness. Doing goodness is one of them and one of the best!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#72. I think writing in a group, even though it can be a challenge - you have to be on your toes all the time - is the way the best comedy gets written. It's very, very collaborative. A lot of comedy writers are definitely introverted nerds.
Megan Amram
#73. The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Julian Barnes
#74. At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
Walter Mosley
#75. I know you've all heard the advice, "Show, don't tell." The best writers don't tell you, and quite frankly they don't just show you
they make you feel it, live it, taste it, touch it. Storytelling is about being in the moment with the characters.
Josh Lanyon
#76. You can always tell the quality of an author by their cover picture. Bad writers bear an idiotic smile on the inside flap. Great writers take up the entire back cover looking slightly mad, sad, or bored. The very best writers, though, had the superior ability to die before photography was invented.
Bauvard
#77. My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.
A.S. Byatt
#78. were to ask whether the writers recommend visiting Mexico City, the response would be both firm and passionate: "Yes, of course." Because this is the best city on the planet, in spite of itself.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
#79. It's okay to fail. It does not make you forever a failure. In fact, there are no failures really. Only human beings doing the best they can.
Christy Hall
#80. The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.
Diane Wakoski
#81. When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.
Paul Lieberstein
#82. I like to encourage young talented writers to try and help them get published and so forth, but that's all. That's the best I can do.
Oscar Hijuelos
#83. Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.
Burt Ward
#84. In barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote.
Cesar Aira
#85. All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.
Michael Stutz
#86. The best stories are like the best burgers: big, juicy, and messy.
A.D. Posey
#87. When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.
Alison Owen
#88. After decades spent in rewrite rooms surrounded by other shouting writers, I discovered that I work best alone. I like being in charge of my time, working out the problems according to my own rhythms and being able to nap. That's a big one, the napping on demand!
Maria Semple
#89. Tod Goldberg has long been one of the most interesting writers around, and Gangsterland is his biggest and best book so far.
Thomas Perry
#90. Working 9 to 5 is structure. But tying lines together all hours of day is structure at its best performing magic.
C.C. Wyatt
#91. Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.
Brian A. McBride
#92. Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
Deana J. Driver
#93. Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
Ernest Hemingway,
#95. Best seller material, and she didn't have to write a single word.
A.L. Mabry
#96. To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else's work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own.
Christopher Stocking
#97. I base a deuteragonist on the best friend I never had. A lot of good ideas come from what I never had and cause my imagination to light up.
B.A. Gabrielle
#98. Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.
Truman Capote
#99. For short term relaxation, I take a hot tub. It's my best way to unblock writers' block, too. For a bit longer relaxation, I enjoy camping. Just being in the wilderness, with no phones or computers or anything I have to do really refreshes my spirit.
Ellen Hopkins
#100. As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.
Sharon Shinn
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