New Writers Quotes

#1. 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

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

Christopher Fowler

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

Craig Raine

#8. 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

#9. 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.

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

Peter Lerangis

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Paul Di Filippo

#14. 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

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

A.D. Posey

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

Jan Neruda

#17. 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

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

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Larry Niven

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#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 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

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

Toni Jerrman

#37. 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

#38. Everything that is old was once new.

A.D. Posey

#39. 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

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

Alasdair MacLean

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

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

Katori Hall

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

Charlaine Harris

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

Joseph Fiennes

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

Justin Cronin

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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.

#69. 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

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

A.D. Posey

#71. 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

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

Carla H. Krueger

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

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

Carole Nelson Douglas

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. I think that writers often try too hard in the name of expression, when often it's just a matter of reframing what's around you or republishing a preexisting text into a new environment that makes for a successful work.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#83. Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.

William Zinsser

#84. As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.

Sharon Shinn

#85. Writing is a form of art. Do not use New Times Roman or Arial because it's boring and hackneyed.

Natalya Vorobyova

#86. 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

#87. Fortunately, we have writers who very much respect the classic characters and the integrity of the classic characters, that are also terrific comedy writers and are able to put these classic characters in new and interesting, and quite funny situations for today.

Bob Bergen

#88. Every day in New York City is a test. Work hard and pass this test, you get a chocolate cookie. From a strange man on the subway. A man without pants.

Christy Hall

#89. If we are artists- hell, whether or not we're artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn't have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.

Dani Shapiro

#90. 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

#91. It ends when you're ready for a new beginning.

A.D. Posey

#92. I broke in with four hits, and the writers promptly declared they had seen the new Ty Cobb. It took me only a few days to correct that impression.

Casey Stengel

#93. The reason I'm here today, the reason I own a brand new Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the reason I have a big log cabin and I got cars and all kinds of stuff is because I'm a writer and writers own everything. So you learn how to write.

Dan Aykroyd

#94. New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.

Tim LaHaye

#95. I tell myself that some names can be mistakes, like Mxyplyzyk, a store in New York that lost customers because few could spell its name to look up the address. I tell myself that lots of writers agonize over titles, and often get them wrong at first.

Caroline Leavitt

#96. The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

Donald E. Westlake

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

Greg Egan

#98. I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

Donald Barthelme

#99. In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have - the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.

Jonathan Stalling

#100. You cannot keep something down that is bound to rise.

Juliet C. Obodo