Top 100 Great Writer Quotes
#1. For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,
Mark Bowden
#2. 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
#3. 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
#5. 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
#6. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
Honore De Balzac
#8. The great writer evokes the words
that buried within hearts of readers.
Toba Beta
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.
Rick Aster
#13. I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.
Nicolas Berggruen
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.
T.K. Naliaka
#17. 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
#19. Listen to the Bee Gees and you can learn to be a great writer.
Kara DioGuardi
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.
Susan Sontag
#23. 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
#24. if you want to be a great writer, you have to be a greed reader.
Imelda Akmal
#25. I mean, the problem is, I think I'm a great writer.
Aaron Eckhart
#26. 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
#27. '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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Being a great writer is not the same as writing great.
John Updike
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book ... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Anthony Burgess
#38. I don't consider myself a great writer, but I would like to think that I can at least proof- read.
Aimee Mann
#40. I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the "gift" of not belonging.
Elizabeth Lesser
#41. You know, that's kind of the thing, I can't freestyle and I used to always wonder why I couldn't, and when I would try once out of every six months, but I was always a great writer!
Bubba Sparxxx
#42. Inside every great writer there is a naked girl trying to get out.
Chloe Thurlow
#44. People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer.
Yann Martel
#45. When I look back at it, I'm mostly amazed at how poorly it was shot. David Kelley is a great writer, and I thought the scripts were great, but it just looks so cheap.
Peter Berg
#46. We made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
Marcel Proust
#47. A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#48. There's a saying by some great writer or other that no man is a hero to his valet. Perhaps everyone ought to have a valet.
Agatha Christie
#49. A great writer weaves words like a painter mixes colors.
James D. Maxon
#50. Edgar Allan Poe is considered the great writer of horror stories, perhaps the greatest - I will say the greatest
William Friedkin
#51. I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer ... if he can only ... tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes.
Clive Barnes
#52. David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer.
Adam McKay
#53. King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
Edward Abbey
#54. Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.
Donald Miller
#55. Hats off to Tavia Gilbert who made Bones alive for me. What a great writer and narrator team. You make listening fun!"
Tavia Gilbert
#56. If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.
Julianna Baggott
#57. The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.
Lafcadio Hearn
#60. Lizzy Weiss is such a great writer, and she really writes for the performances.
Vanessa Marano
#61. Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.
James Shapiro
#62. I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.
Terry Pratchett
#63. The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.
Havelock Ellis
#64. Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.
Walter Mosley
#66. Whoever wishes to rise above the common level must be prepared for a great struggle and recoil before no obstacle. A great writer is just simply a martyr whom the stake cannot kill.
Honore De Balzac
#67. He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him ... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.
Ernest Hemingway,
#68. A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
Tom Bissell
#69. Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.
G.K. Chesterton
#70. That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.
James Frey
#72. My dad was an editor and a writer, and that's really where I would have liked to have gone. But the genetic link was not intact there, so I wound up going into business. But I love to write, still. I'm not a great writer, but I enjoy it.
Anne M. Mulcahy
#73. It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that.
Guy Johnson
#74. My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.
Drake
#75. I know I'm not a great writer. I'm an extremely gifted oral communicator, but when it comes to writing, I'm just a beginner.
Marianne Williamson
#76. The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
W.B.Yeats
#77. I'm not on the run from anything and I'm not at all clear about what I'm running towards. But as some great writer put it, I want to be certain that when I arrive at death, I'm totally exhausted.
Fiona Shaw
#78. A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It's almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
Alain De Botton
#79. When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer have perished.
Theodore Roosevelt
#80. Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.
Tucker Max
#81. It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.
John Erskine
#82. Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write.
Dolph Lundgren
#83. He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
William S. Burroughs
#84. As a songwriter, I was influenced by David Bowie - a great writer. A class above everybody in so many ways. Lennon and McCartney, of course. Class stuff. David Cousins was my favorite lyricist.
Rick Wakeman
#85. The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Aaron Ciechanover
#86. As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy.
David Cross
#87. It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.
Gustave Flaubert
#88. A great writer is a great writer ... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
Phil Klay
#89. He was so good at everything he did. You can't call Ronnie Barker a comedian. He was an actor, and a great writer.
Bruce Forsyth
#90. The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#91. Don't be discouraged if you think you're not a great writer because terrible writers are successful in Hollywood
David Seltzer
#92. Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
Walter Savage Landor
#93. To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
Marcel Proust
#95. I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.
Frank Harris
#96. The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.
Cal Thomas
#97. I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol.
Steven Seagal
#99. A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Cyril Connolly
#100. I've known Shawn for several years. And he's just an amazing talent. He's a great writer, a marvelous, marvelous guitar player, and plays really good fiddle.
Guy Clark
