New Writers Quotes

#1. Too many new writers dress up old cliches.

Christopher Fowler

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

Larry Niven

#5. I love supporting emerging voices, and new writers and directors. I love engaging an audience in a way that doesn't have to involve me, personally, and yet still generates an experience for groups of people.

Zachary Quinto

#6. From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

Garry Disher

#7. New writers seem to pop up from everywhere. And quite a few of them are really good and original.

Toni Jerrman

#8. The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.

Nikki Giovanni

#9. The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.

Molly Ringwald

#10. Our constant desire to genre-label cripples new writers. Let them experiment, explore and surprise.

Carla H. Krueger

#11. I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media ... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start.

Anne McCaffrey

#12. We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.

Matt Groening

#13. I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

Greg Egan

#14. English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

Dean Wesley Smith

#15. 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

#16. As an actress, I am always interested in the new writers.

Donna McKechnie

#17. Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

Orson Scott Card

#18. Every patient tends to bury the most important story inside some other story, just the way new writers often 'bury the lede.' 'Burying the lede' is an old journalism term for when you only find out the real point about halfway into the article, but it also applies to therapy.

Gina Barreca

#19. 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

#20. Most new writers think it's easy to write for children, but it's not. You have to get in a beginning, middle and end, tell a great story, write well, not be condescending-all in a few pages.

Andrea Brown

#21. I'd like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.

Terri Windling

#22. I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.

Dean Koontz

#23. In my view, the ebook world for both established and new authors is a terrific new and exciting format. It is a format that will bring forth many new writers to publishing.

Robert Gottlieb

#24. One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are.

Carol Berg

#25. Writing is not the lottery. New writers have to be realistic about what it takes to get published. But there is one similarity to the lottery: You have to play to win.

Lori Perkins

#26. When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

Paul Auster

#27. Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches.

Jenna Bush

#28. Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

Greg Egan

#29. I'm inspired by artists and musicians. There are so many wonderful and talented people in the world. I love discovering new music, new writers, or new art.

Alicia Keys

#30. My to-be-read pile sadly would most likely outlive me - though I tried valiantly to catch up with it, I'd never get there. The allure of new books, new writers, characters who beckoned to me would never wane.

Rebecca Raisin

#31. Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

Jane Hirshfield

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.

George Lucas

#35. Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic.

Vivianne Crowley

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

Craig Raine

#37. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#38. I like helping other writers who don't know what to do or where to go in New York.

Peter Lerangis

#39. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.

Robert Black

#40. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.

Richard Flanagan

#41. Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

Paul Di Filippo

#42. It's a new world. Stand up.

A.D. Posey

#43. No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We've got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

Jan Neruda

#44. New Testament writers do not tell me why God chose to save me. They only tell me to be thankful that He did.

J.I. Packer

#45. A step taken to a new idea is a step taken to a new world!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#46. 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

#47. The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.

Sara Sheridan

#48. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Jorge Luis Borges

#49. All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

Carson McCullers

#50. When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.

Mike Greenberg

#51. I'm always impressed with the way the writers find new and creative ways of killing people. But my favourite has to be the hat pin through the ear.

John Nettles

#52. You may give up your big dream and that is very hard! If necessary, give it up but then create a new one! Never live without big dreams because they will keep you alive in life!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

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

Bernard Malamud

#54. I would like to see more new productions of new material by new composers/lyricists/book writers. I would like to see people take more chances. I think because everything costs so much they're not taking the chances they used to.

Harold Prince

#55. It's hard to say, I picked one of my favorite articles for the MAD vault. Which is one of the features of the Magazine so they don't have to actually pay artists or writers to come up with new stuff.

Al Yankovic

#56. There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

Eleanor Catton

#57. It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

Kurt Vonnegut

#58. 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

#59. To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!

Kate Baldwin

#60. What to do Before Your Book Launch is the new invaluable tool for writers. There is so much to know and now it's all in one place.

Julie Klam

#61. Everything that is old was once new.

A.D. Posey

#62. Writing something new is an effective way to get rid of writer's block. Or you can observe the people around you and fantasize like I do.

B.A. Gabrielle

#63. I have the longing that all writers have for new ears to pour my words into.

Alasdair MacLean

#64. Something significant, magical, and
inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of a book. You explore new lands, meet new people, feel new emotions, and are no longer the same person you were one word prior to reading it.

Martha Sweeney

#65. Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

Nathalie Sarraute

#66. I always crave to see more stories about and by people of color, particularly new work by young black writers.

Katori Hall

#67. I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'

Daniel Woodrell

#68. I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog

Robin Hawdon

#69. All I can say is that I am not one of those writers who want 100% of their book in the film. I recognize that film is a different medium and the filmmaker must have the right to bring some new elements to the table, provided the soul of the book is preserved.

Vikas Swarup

#70. Despite my vast interest in other universes and new ideas and space, travel and time travel, which by the way I think is impossible, the basic thing is human character, which is the main thing of most writers.

Philip Jose Farmer

#71. And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Tobias Wolff

#72. There are only so many stories in the world ... Duplication of plots is bound to happen because most writers have read very extensively in their genre and have become aware they are adding an extra layer to the meta-narrative, finding a new spin on the original.

Kerry Greenwood

#73. Well, you know, writers just suck up new experiences - we're just like the vacuum cleaners of newness.

Charlaine Harris

#74. I love new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers.

Joseph Fiennes

#75. Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

Justin Cronin

#76. When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.

Christian De Portzamparc

#77. Imagine truth as a chain of great mountains, their tops way up in the clouds. Writers explore these truths, always looking out for new paths up these peaks.

Jess Walter

#78. I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously.

Frederick Lenz

#79. There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

Robert Gottlieb

#80. Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they're writing fluently doesn't mean they're writing well.

William Zinsser

#81. Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

Don Roff

#82. I wake up to an email from the writers with the new script, and I always get so excited because I know it'll be better all-around than the script from the week before.

Bailee Madison

#83. I remember one of my writers on 'Weeds' got a new apartment and didn't get cable or a dish. He just hooked his computer up to the TV. I was like, 'This is it. This is how it's happening.'

Jenji Kohan

#84. Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.

Jane Leavy

#85. You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

Anne Rice

#86. I am hoping to work with writers publishing books for first time, since I of course remember what that experience is like. It's all a bit of a mystery for new authors who don't know what to expect.

Rebecca Stead

#87. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - then success is insanity squared!
(2012 SCBWI New Member Conference; Richmond, VA)

Brian Rock

#88. I value my correspondence with writers ... I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him - he is someone I really like. I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That's enough for me.

Alan Lightman

#89. The traces to the East haven been broken, the Republican party will never again be dominated by the editorial writers for the New York Herald Tribune. Free at last.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#90. The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire.

Dave Gibbons

#91. There is magic in the old and magic in the new; the trick is to successfully combine the two.

A.D. Posey

#92. I think writers have to be proactive: they've got to use new technology and social media. Yes, it's hard to get noticed by traditional publishers, but there's a great deal of opportunity out there if you've got the right story.

Ian Rankin

#93. Television and cable have become the new independent films, in a sense, for writers and actors to gravitate towards. That's why I like short films, too; I love doing readings, audio books, working with young filmmakers; anything that keeps you from getting blase about yourself or in a rut.

Campbell Scott

#94. Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the 'New Woman' won't condescend in future to accept. She will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it too!

Bram Stoker

#95. What we have ... is something most folks wait a lifetime for, and only touch for a heartbeat. They let go too quickly, or they're too scared to hold on, or they never see what's right in front of them. But we're going to hold on as tight as we can. - Jonah Walker

Molli Moran

#96. The writers' strike a couple years ago was a bonanza for reality TV shows new and old.

Carole Nelson Douglas

#97. I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Harold Bloom

#98. When I moved to New York, the reputation just followed me, and I am regularly invited to play in home games, by writers in particular, though finance folk also invite me on occasion.

Katy Lederer

#99. A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn's a pretty nice place to live. And a lot of writers who might not geographically reside in New York still point their ambitions towards New York in some sense.

Chad Harbach

#100. The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle!

Lu Xun