Top 100 Living Writers Quotes
#1. Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
Cyril Connolly
#2. Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.
Edward Dahlberg
#3. You're ... writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.
Raymond Carver
#4. I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.
Henry Rollins
#5. For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker
#6. Cherish every relationship in your life. There are certain things in life that can't be fixed if broken!
Avijeet Das
#7. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
Dean Wesley Smith
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
John Perry Barlow
#11. 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
#12. And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by.
Avijeet Das
#13. I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.
Hanya Yanagihara
#14. The night is the balm for the wounded souls of the world.
Avijeet Das
#15. Man must spend much more time in extraordinary natural places to grasp much better how remarkable our planet is and to realise what a great privilege and what an enormous joy to be living here!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#16. I'm living the dream! I just want to tell actors and writers it's never too late, and it can happen when you least expect it.
Geneva Carr
#17. It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard.
Dionne Brand
#18. You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today.
Nelson Algren
#19. I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.
Ali Smith
#21. I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.
Kiran Desai
#22. Because all writers are human beings first and writers second, my guess is that any advice for living with a writer is about the same as advice for living with a plumber or a refrigerator salesperson.
Clyde Edgerton
#23. My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.
Margaret Mahy
#24. Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.
Herbert Gold
#25. The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
#26. In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
Lauren Groff
#27. I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.
Khaled Hosseini
#28. All writers
all beings
are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force ... All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..
Janet Frame
#29. Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.
Chinua Achebe
#30. There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for
life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises ...
If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,
not what pays
Toni Morrison
#31. Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.
Chad Harbach
#32. We inhale life and exhale words. that's just what writers' do
Terry A. O'Neal
#33. I think writers can get a little melodramatic sometimes about their work, and it helps me not to do that, to just say, "Well, this is how I make a living, and I need to become a very good craftsman."
Donald Miller
#34. Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?
Richard Yates
#35. I was always observing. Even while talking, living, going through every motion, I was watching myself and the situation. That's a writer. Always observing.
Mary Ellen Hannibal
#36. I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.
Romesh Gunesekera
#37. I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
#38. Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen's nib as tamed animals do the raised whip.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
#39. Why do you think you are always right?" Asks a dumb person that can't understand why I make a living as a self-help author or why she is wasting my time and I will never speak to her ever again.
Robin Sacredfire
#40. I look out over my life and see a million question marks with only a few definitive exclamation points. I'm living for the next exclamation.
Christy Hall
#41. Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.
Peter York
#42. It takes thirty-three days to write a book
only thirty-three days. remember, writers lie for a living.
Darynda Jones
#43. Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.
Fay Weldon
#44. Whining writers are a hideous sight; we should really shut up, because we are lucky if we can cobble together a living from all of this.
Deborah Moggach
#45. At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind's dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind's dungeons.
Avijeet Das
#46. Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.
Will Eisner
#48. Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It's an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.
Jason E. Hodges
#49. It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.
Don DeLillo
#50. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.
Anne Tyler
#51. True writers know that writing is not something they feel required to do,
or to make a living they must do, it is quite frankly like breathing. Some
can breathe often and fluently, some short breaths, some a long exhale
and for many of us it is the patient steady breathing surrounding life.
Milissa R. Bailey
#52. All the fabulous and fearless writers gathered here, whether they are living in Manila, the US, or elsewhere in the ever-growing Philippine diaspora, have a deep connection and abiding love for this crazy-making, intoxicating city. There's nothing like it in the world, and they know it,
Jessica Hagedorn
#53. The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so.
Alan Dean Foster
#54. Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?
Hannah Harding
#55. Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
Stefan Zweig
#56. A warm dead photograph is much livelier than a living cold reality!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#57. It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.
Molly Antopol
#58. But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.
Fay Godwin
#59. Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
A person's true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all.
Imre Kertesz
#60. Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'
Amelie Nothomb
#61. Learning is essential for living the life you love.
A.D. Posey
#62. I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.
Moby
#63. Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.
Janette Rallison
#64. If one wants to go on living, one must evolve. Before, when we composed, we would start by a series of music themes. Once created, we would hire writers and lyricists to make up the text and the story line. I was the first to do this backwards with 'Man of La Mancha.'
Mitch Leigh
#65. My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who've been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we're living in, I put my faith in those people.
Barry Lopez
#66. If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.
Pankaj Mishra
#67. There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
#68. I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.
Antonio Lobo Antunes
#69. I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
Kathryn Stockett
#70. Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.
Thomas C. Foster
#71. I think a writer is not an ideal husband ... Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they're living with, or they get irritable with the people that they're living with when the people insist on being noticed.
Roy Blount Jr.
#73. If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.
Sharon Delarose
#74. A writer leads a hyphenated-life with words
Munia Khan
#76. Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.
Coco J. Ginger
#77. As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world.
Laurie Foos
#78. Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make.
Norman Lear
#79. We're living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we're working with - the landscape of language - is very different than it was a few decades ago.
Kenneth Goldsmith
#80. Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.
Pankaj Mishra
#81. ... the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element ...
Derek Walcott
#82. You may follow the footsteps
The whole day will pass
With you going around in circles
Yet not reaching anywhere at last!
Avijeet Das
#83. Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.
Ashwin Sanghi
#84. Most people think that making a living from books is fun or joyful, but there's much more to it than what the eyes can see, and I wish I had more time for more profitable and also joyful activities.
Robin Sacredfire
#86. It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.
Robert E. Howard
#87. If all shy, soulful young women who dreamed of becoming writers for a living actually could do that, imagine the library we would have.
Sarah Elwell
#88. I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.
Jack Kerouac
#89. Writers are completely out of touch with reality. Writers are a crazy person. We create conflict - for a living. We do this all the time, sometimes on a weekly basis; we create horrible, incredible circumstances and then figure a way out of them. That's what we do.
Joss Whedon
#90. When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel.
That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel.
Tito's birth changed all that.
Diogo Mainardi
#91. While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.
Lauren Groff
#92. Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.
Kate Christensen
#93. A world that does not love, respect and protect its Women is doomed to perish! Because Women are Mother Earth!
Avijeet Das
#94. I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life.
Marlon James
#95. The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.
Padraig Pearse
#96. I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.
Daniel Alarcon
#97. I've never thought about the con of living in New York as a writer. Because I always think, Oh, what fun to be around so many writers. Because I've never been around so many writers.
Victoria Chang
#98. It is obvious that most people are not living the life they want to live! The easiest solution for this problem is to give up the life you want to live. And the hardest solution is this: Give up everything which prevents you to live the life you want to live!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#99. As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.
Erica Jong
#100. For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
Russell Banks
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