New Writer Quotes

#1. When a new writer comes onto a project, he'll make wholesale changes just to mark the territory or for greater credit.

Jon Spaihts

#2. So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

Trevor Nunn

#3. If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

Poppy Z. Brite

#4. 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

#5. A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.

Miriam Toews

#6. When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.

Martin Amis

#7. The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.

Steven Moffat

#8. It's a great day when you meet a new writer, isn't it? It's like an introduction to a best friend you didn't know existed just hours before.

Victoria Connelly

#9. A new writer starting out today, whether it's for TV or film, they have to remember that they're telling the story to themselves first of all, and they have to tell the story so that their life depends upon it.

Tony Grisoni

#10. I was a new writer and I was supposed to write all the time, wasn't I? I had not yet discovered that there are times when one can't write, one shouldn't write, times for thought, for deepening, or just reading, or simply living.

Stanley Crawford

#11. Zachary Jernigan's short stories are in deep conversation with the history of the genre while maintaining a thoroughly modern sensibility. Here's a new writer who has found his voice. Listen to him and enjoy!

James Patrick Kelly

#12. But my mother was aglow. She had a continuing fascination with celebrities, and now she had one of her own. She was never moved by what I was doing (in an interview she said, "He writes his own material, I'm always telling him he needs a new writer") ...

Steve Martin

#13. No sense in a man with writer's block going to New York.

Kurt Vonnegut

#14. Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City ...

Christy Hall

#15. Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

Elizabeth Meriwether

#16. I was a writer for 'New York' magazine. I had been to business school, but what did I know? Still, everybody from the receptionists on up to the editor would ask me what they should do with their money.

Andrew Tobias

#17. A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

William Stafford

#18. It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

Jamaica Kincaid

#19. 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,

#20. 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

#21. I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

Barbara Kingsolver

#22. And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

Jimmy Buffett

#23. 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

#24. Why did I become a writer? Because I grew up in New York City, and there were seven newspapers in New York City, and my family was an inveterate reader of newspapers and I loved holding a paper in my hand. It was something sacred.

H. G. Bissinger

#25. An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure.

Jon Meacham

#26. I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

Edward Abbey

#27. Acquiring an aggressive, honest, and communicative agent with actual relationships in real-live New York publishing houses is, in my opinion, the single most important move that a writer who aspires to be successful can make.

John Lescroart

#28. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)

Bernard Malamud

#29. I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.

Ishmael Reed

#30. Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.

Robert Dugoni

#31. 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

#32. I had to battle it out with all the usual suspects and whatnot and go to the callback. I was lucky that (writer-director) John (Levine) and I were sort of these two white-boy hip-hop-heads from New York. I think that alone got me in the door.

Josh Peck

#33. I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.

Watt Key

#34. I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'

Diane Mott Davidson

#35. When I came to New York as a writer, I was taken with the idea that you're only getting in on bridges and ferries and through tunnels. The idea behind 'Takedown' is that it would be very hard to get out.

Brad Thor

#36. It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.

David Sedaris

#37. For the writer, the risks are quite palpable and enduring. With each new character, each new setting, and each new plotline, something dark from deep inside the recesses of our minds makes its way to the surface where it will take hold and remain. I wouldn't have it any other way.

J.F. Juzwik

#38. 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

#39. We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

Maya Angelou

#40. It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anais Nin

#41. As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.

Charlie Pierce

#42. The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

Anais Nin

#43. I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#44. In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work.

Sara Sheridan

#45. I've had a five- or six-year down-spell as a writer, and now that most of the other contracts are cleared or down to the last book, I have a chance to do what I want to do - specifically, something set in New Orleans.

Robert Asprin

#46. A writer's refuge is imagination. Therein lies the ability to create a new world and bring order to chaos.

Mark Rubinstein

#47. A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

William Stafford

#48. What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!

Ray Bradbury

#49. Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!

Larry Niven

#50. One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Justin Cronin

#51. I won't read a new graphic comic novel until the writer has completed the entire series. I got burned a few times when I got turned on to a book, plowed through it only to find out the author was in the middle of writing the next.

Nick Offerman

#52. What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.

Edmund White

#53. I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift ... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.

Jess Walter

#54. I can't recall a story that played out exactly as I'd expected it to. That's one of the thrills of journalism - being surprised, and learning new stuff, but it also poses the biggest challenge to a writer's character.

Dave Barry

#55. In a sense, all fiction is experimental. Every new book is an adventure into unknown territory. As Hemingway told us, you (the writer) have to go out beyond where you have gone before.

Richard Laymon

#56. Despite popular conviction, a writer needn't wear black, be unshaven, sickly and parade around New York's East Village spewing aphorisms and scaring children.

Noah Lukeman

#57. What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

Ernest Hemingway,

#58. Being asked to read another writer's rough draft is the literary equivalent of being asked to help a friend move a couch to a new place.

Paul Tremblay

#59. No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.

Therese Fowler

#60. What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I'm not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.

Barbara Kingsolver

#61. Adolescence is the most Technicolor time in our lives. It's the time when adulthood is new and we care most about it. It contains the highs and lows that excite me as a writer.

Ned Vizzini

#62. Every time I start off a book or a story I feel like I'm developing a new style or approach for that individual story alone, and it sometimes feels as if readers are looking for the same style/approach from the same writer over and over again, which hasn't helped me in the publishing biz.

Scott Bradfield

#63. A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience.

Joan Aiken

#64. For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom.

Cao Yu

#65. I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.

David Lagercrantz

#66. 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

#67. I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

Nelson Algren

#68. If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

Kurt Vonnegut

#69. In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.

Charles Bracelen Flood

#70. New wave disco was coming to the fore then, and we were at a different point entirely. I like to listen to dance music, but I don't think I'm primarily a dance music writer.

Stan Ridgway

#71. Andy Gullahorn is my favorite new musical discovery of the past five years. He's a brilliant writer, a fine musician and a generous spirit.

David LaMotte

#72. As a writer, as a lyricist, you're just trying to make sure that you're not repeating yourself. And that's a danger for a lot of people. So for me, I just try to keep taking corners and trying to find new paths.

Corey Taylor

#73. I try not to repeat a story. I try not to repeat an emotion. I want it to be all sort of new for the viewers and to challenge myself as a writer, so there's always pressure. What else can you come up with?

Michael Patrick King

#74. God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.

Dennis Potter

#75. As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self - the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells - and keep an objective eye on the reader.

William Zinsser

#76. I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of 'The Village,' came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.

Bryce Dallas Howard

#77. It's fun because I really do love meeting new people. Comedy can be so different from show to show and from writer to writer and actor to actor. People don't set out to make a bad show.

Fiona Gubelmann

#78. I love being able to be a writer. That's what I moved to New York to be.

John Searles

#79. There is a great deal at stake here, many writers fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for the writer? freedom of invention, freedom to tell the truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new structures.

Andrea Dworkin

#80. It was in New York, and I've always wanted to film in New York. And the writer was a teenage friend of mine. We did youth theatre together when we were 16 and always had a dream of making a film together. And ten years later, we've done it. So it's great.

Rosamund Pike

#81. I always send new writers to 'Writer's Digest Books' line-up of how-to books. I read them all when I was starting out, and they were very helpful.

Gail Z. Martin

#82. The person who judges you without getting to know you has revealed nothing about you but exposes everything about himself to the world. The prudent one knows that true knowledge is not born out of ignorance but a desire to know before casting judgement.

Crystal Evans

#83. For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel.

Ismail Kadare

#84. Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

E.B. White

#85. Truth be told, I didn't want to be on T.V. I was going to be a writer or producer or a director, and at the end of my sophomore year, my department chairman put me up for a job doing weekend weather in Syracuse, New York.

Al Roker

#86. I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

Karen Russell

#87. Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn't be publishing anyone at all after a while.

Victoria Strauss

#88. We're all in this together - when one writer succeeds, all writers succeed. I love discovering new authors. I think we need to take care of each other and talk about craft and nurture talent.

Lisa Gardner

#89. A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

Roald Dahl

#90. The first thing a writer has to do is find a new source of income.

Ellen Gilchrist

#91. I kind of want to be seen as an American writer, not just a New York writer.

Jami Attenberg

#92. Terry Jackson, who is the Miami Herald's automotive writer and TV critic. That's correct: This man gets paid to drive new cars AND watch television. If he ever dies and goes to heaven, it's going to be a big let down.

Dave Barry

#93. I love New York, and I'm drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I've just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.

Garrison Keillor

#94. It's pretty cool that artists like Flo Rida and Bingo Players can be inspired to interpret a song like 'Piano in the Dark' in completely new genres. As an artist and writer, it's the highest compliment we can be paid.

Brenda Russell

#95. How it's Done is a richly woven tale of a young woman who discovers what it really means to be an adult. This story, told with honesty and heart, held me in my seat to the very end. I have discovered a new favorite writer in Christine MacLean.

Han Nolan

#96. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

Derek Walcott

#97. I hated L.A. for a long time, and I wanted to leave it. I had these fantasies of going to 'SNL' and falling in love with some writer on 'SNL,' of getting married and living in New York.

Mindy Kaling

#98. I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

Sam Shepard

#99. 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

#100. With my simple writings I want to change the mindset of humanity so that they themselves can create a positive new world where they can live with dignity and peace.

Debasish Mridha