Top 100 Great Writer Quotes
#1. As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.
Candice Millard
#2. For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,
Mark Bowden
#3. To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
Anne Lamott
#4. A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
Andre Maurois
#5. The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.
Isabel Allende
#6. The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
Will Self
#7. 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
#8. On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years. We've just lost a great writer in Antonin Scalia.
Dahlia Lithwick
#9. When you're reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call "taking up with a writer," something happens.
Al Pacino
#10. American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Gore Vidal
#12. I'm not a writer, so I don't know what that looks like, but I can only imagine that you get all those great minds in that room, of those particular writers that created the show, and it's going to be great.
Carrie-Anne Moss
#13. Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.
Ted Kotcheff
#14. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...
Kurt Vonnegut
#15. Being a writer is great, and being a parent is great, and I hate Marching Band.
MaryJanice Davidson
#16. I was playing the game where I was going to be a great TV or film writer some day and there was nothing else that I thought about, including other people.
Dan Harmon
#17. I was rather a poor student, too easily distracted - did a lot of gazing out of windows, fine for training to be a writer, but not a great way to achieve in the classroom. The truth is that I was happy to bumble along and do enough to avoid detention, but not much more.
Michael Morpurgo
#18. When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.
Judy Blume
#19. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
Honore De Balzac
#20. It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
Jeff VanderMeer
#21. Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.
Her response was, If it's only a symbol, to hell with it.
Flannery O'Connor
#23. When I'm out and about, I'll text or email myself from my phone. A smart phone is a great tool for a writer.
Steven Hall
#24. The great writer evokes the words
that buried within hearts of readers.
Toba Beta
#25. For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.
Barack Obama
#27. 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
#28. I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener
#29. Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer. He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.
Ann Goldstein
#30. Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.
David Mamet
#31. A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.
Bill Gates
#32. The things that I have done that haven't been as successful have been things that have been largely out of the public view, which is great. It's terrible, when you're a theater writer, to have a big flop publicly.
Robert Lopez
#33. Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
Joyce Carol Oates
#34. A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.
Richard LaGravenese
#35. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Greil Marcus
#36. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.
James Franco
#37. You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.
Rick Aster
#38. I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.
Nicolas Berggruen
#39. My first motion capture game was with Sony - 'NBA: The Life.' It was very ahead of its time. Brandon Akiaten, he was the writer and director. He had a real vision of what this game was meant to be; it was a basketball game where I was the Jerry Maguire sports agent type guy. And it was great!
Nolan North
#40. 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
#41. We are very slow to recognise in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas.
Marcel Proust
#42. 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
#43. Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.
T.K. Naliaka
#44. while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one. I
Stephen King
#46. It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.
Angela Carter
#47. As a writer, it's fun to create. And once you get into a long-running show with very established characters and a very established tone and format, after a while it's a really great job, but that's what it is - a job.
Alan Ball
#48. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that.
Maya Angelou
#49. When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. 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.
Nick Flynn
#50. Listen to the Bee Gees and you can learn to be a great writer.
Kara DioGuardi
#51. 'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
John Irving
#52. If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather
#53. The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.
Martin Cruz Smith
#54. 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
#55. I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.
Anthony Bourdain
#56. Truthfully, I guess I would like to be remembered as a great writer and a kind person. I wouldn't mind if an expensive bag were named after me, like Jane Birkin.
Mindy Kaling
#57. Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru said.
Haruki Murakami
#58. A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.
Susan Sontag
#59. I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.
Mindy Kaling
#60. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every last person out there isn't dating a writer.
Rachel Bloom
#61. I think the internet is a great marketing tool
but marketing is not my job. I'm a writer. My job is to write novels.
Bentley Little
#62. The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#63. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#64. Filmmakers are always in a bubble; along with our crew or writer, we don't really get to socialize with other filmmakers, so the great thing about Sundance is you can see many other filmmakers doing the same thing you do.
George Tillman Jr.
#65. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
Flannery O'Connor
#66. My first three books, the collections, were fun to write and a great start but I have matured so much as a writer since then and am extremely proud of the Detective Byone novels- they will be my legacy!
Ricardo M. Fleshman
#67. He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
French philosopher and writer.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#68. 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
#69. if you want to be a great writer, you have to be a greed reader.
Imelda Akmal
#70. I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.
Erskine Caldwell
#72. It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well ... problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#73. I mean, the problem is, I think I'm a great writer.
Aaron Eckhart
#74. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview]
Ray Bradbury
#75. The great writers are great as they have big workshop of imagination.
Kishore Bansal
#76. As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.
Dwight Yoakam
#77. Today is your wright-time. Anything worth writing will be, or has been written already. A great story chooses its writer lest no wright should boast. Just write! If you don't, you will come right in contact with your thoughts someplace soon.
Amah Lambert
#78. Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.
Mickey Spillane
#79. Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.
Salman Rushdie
#80. Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that people can only do certain things.
Dhani Jones
#81. 'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.
Victor LaValle
#82. I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe.
Steven Curtis Chapman
#83. It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
John Grisham
#84. I couldn't enjoy 'A Dance With Dragons,' unfortunately. Of course, I enjoyed it, but it was the first of the books I read as a writer on 'Game of Thrones,' so all I could do is think, 'We're going to have to shift that,' 'We won't be able to afford that,' or 'That's a great scene.'
Bryan Cogman
#85. My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.
Neil Gaiman
#86. Being a great writer is not the same as writing great.
John Updike
#87. 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
#88. The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#90. The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
Carson McCullers
#91. It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
Havelock Ellis
#92. I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.
Gene Weingarten
#93. As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.
Adam Schlesinger
#94. Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.
Matthew Specktor
#95. He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer.
Simon Callow
#96. I also have a role model back in New Zealand, a woman called Miranda Harcourt. She's an actress and a writer. Her willingness to stay open to material is really great. I read a lot, and I try to watch and listen to diverse material.
Rose McIver
#97. Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
William Wordsworth
#98. A writer writes to a great extent to be read (let's admire those who say they don't, but not believe them).
Albert Camus
#99. I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.
Lee Daniels
#100. Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.
Karrine Steffans
