For Writers Quotes

#1. It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.

Pattiann Rogers

#2. 'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.

Terrence McNally

#3. There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

Michael Anti

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

Jesse Kellerman

#5. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.

Dara Horn

#6. 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

#7. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.

Edward Abbey

#8. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

Zadie Smith

#9. 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

#10. The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways.

Sandra Cisneros

#11. Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

Terri Windling

#12. Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can't for long conceal the toxic spots on your character - Philip Larkin is Exhibit A - nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.

William Giraldi

#13. Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#14. Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Margaret Atwood

#15. 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

#16. It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.

Paul McCartney

#17. So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us.

Natalie Goldberg

#18. It's a dream for all writers to write for Broadway.

Richard M. Sherman

#19. What we need to do, as writers, is find out where our market is and adapt to it. I'm not saying that you follow every trend slavishly, but what you see is that, if there is a sea-change in the way that things are being done, then you account for it.

John Scalzi

#20. I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person.

Hanya Yanagihara

#21. For comic writers charge Socrates with making the worse appear the better reason.

Quintilian

#22. Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom.

A.D. Posey

#23. Described as a "workaholic speed-writing freak" by fellow writers, a "creative writing class drill sergeant" by his writing 'padawans', Voinov is a self-confessed geek and has enlarged his days by 12 secret hours in return for the sacrifice of ten albino virgin pygmy hippos.

Aleksandr Voinov

#24. As if the night has been created for the writers and as if the silence of it is the very inspiration itself!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#25. I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.

Jonathan Galassi

#26. Don't waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

#27. Simon Gathercole argues that both Paul and the Gospel writers considered the good news to have three basic elements: the identity of Jesus as Son of God and Messiah, the death of Jesus for sin and justification, and the establishment of the reign of God and the new creation.12

Timothy Keller

#28. Some scientists use TeX or LatEX but for most people Word is the thing that writers use these days.

Miguel De Icaza

#29. I've read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don't hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren't.

Mary Roach

#30. 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

#31. I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

George R R Martin

#32. Love was for dummies, soulmates were the creation of pulp-fiction writers; romance was craved by ageing, lonely cat owners. Successful relationships were built on rationality and compromise.

Karan Bajaj

#33. 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

#34. TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.

Vince Gilligan

#35. Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed in.

Noah Cicero

#36. The greatest thing about having done 'Orange' are the doors that have opened for me, and people have been able to see me, like the executives and the casting directors - also, all of the fantastic directors and writers for independent films.

Ruby Rose

#37. For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.

William Golding

#38. 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

#39. For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Eudora Welty

#40. 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

#41. A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.

Matthew Pearl

#42. I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.

M.K. Hobson

#43. Writers perform the so-called counterfactual thinking all the time. All the time. For most people, counterfactual thingking is a habit, but for writers, it is a necessity

Ika Natassa

#44. Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.

Ray Bradbury

#45. Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

Barry Unsworth

#46. Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.

Victor LaValle

#47. This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

#48. Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Craig Raine

#49. 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

#50. He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.

Russell Shorto

#51. I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.

Ellen Datlow

#52. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

Julia Stiles

#53. Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

Mohsin Hamid

#54. GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.

Lisa Washington

#55. It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.

Aravind Adiga

#56. I keep the description basic as it allows you to mould the story around your life.

Airam

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#60. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.

Bjornstjerne Bjornson

#61. To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.

Evan Osnos

#62. 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

#63. For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.

Carol Bly

#64. Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

Flannery O'Connor

#65. Male writers are thought of as "writers" first and then "men". As for female writers, they are first "feamle" and only then "writers".

Elif Shafak

#66. 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

#67. Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them;---but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time. [About F. Scott Fitzgerald]

Maxwell Perkins

#68. I think books and movies are going to go a long way together in the future. I think we writers are very important material for directors.

Tatiana De Rosnay

#69. The night is the balm for the wounded souls of the world.

Avijeet Das

#70. There is no time for holding back.

A.D. Posey

#71. 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

#72. What are all these writers fighting for? For their own victory or for the victory of their profession?

Dejan Stojanovic

#73. All writers are obviously neurotic ... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

Christopher Koch

#74. The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

Richard Ford

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.

Jeanette Winterson

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. To these things do writers sink; and then the critics tell them that they "talk for effect"; and then the writers answer: "What the devil else should we talk for? Ineffectualness?

G.K. Chesterton

#82. Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.

Buffy Andrews

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. Capitol Records were very keen for me to write and see how I got on; I think that is what defined my sound. The first session I had was with two young up-and-coming writers, Nick Atkinson and Tom Wilding, and I went into a session a bit nervous because I hadn't written that many songs before.

Shane Filan

#86. The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire ... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.

Teju Cole

#87. It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

Norton Juster

#88. I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

Charles McCarry

#89. The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me.

Christy Hall

#90. I really appreciate what the writers are doing and respect everything that they do. So, I was satisfied, for sure.

Pablo Schreiber

#91. Eating and sleeping are the two periods in your life where writers get a pass for not reading. Check that.
Only sleeping.

Ted Bell

#92. You will need seed money, so begin saving for your book. Don't give up. Also, write down the ideas that you have right away so you don't lose them.

Soraya Diase Coffelt

#93. I started out with almost entirely black fans except for a little handful of people in the horror writers' community, and those people really liked horror, you know. They will go to any lengths and read whomever they can find because they like that feeling of being scared.

Tananarive Due

#94. To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Steven Heighton

#95. 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

#96. Believe in people, they fly for a day. Teach them to believe in themselves, they soar for a lifetime.

A.D. Posey

#97. It's difficult for writers in the theatre. It's difficult for writers in the theatre.

Donna McKechnie

#98. We're huge fans of 'Game of Thrones' for example, 'Orphan Black.' And even though those shows don't necessarily correlate directly with 'Arrow,' I'm a very big believer that writers are the product of their inspirations.

Marc Guggenheim

#99. when you are a child you unconsciously adopt certain beliefs. Yet, there comes
the necessity to upgrade these beliefs as you grow older.

Derric Yuh Ndim

#100. 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