Top 100 On Writers Quotes
#1. There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda. Propaganda can be written by anybody, including dictators.
Wole Soyinka
#2. My view on writers? We all have the same shovels, but never dig in the same places or to the exact same depth
Carl Henegan
#3. Writing can be a bit like unfolding something ... Slowly, the writer reveals what's happening. But that's only half of what's going on. Writers are very cunning people who are not only unfolding and revealing. Just like conjurors and magicians, they are hiding stuff too.
Michael Rosen
#4. There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.
Ray Bradbury
#5. If I have a better idea, I say, 'Can we try one like this?' I try not to step on writers' toes, but ninety-nine percent of the time, it ends up in the movie, and sometimes it's the line that everyone remembers and quotes from the movie.
William Sadler
#6. On writers' workshops: It is the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
Stephen King
#7. Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
Amy Tan
#8. It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.
Kate Bernheimer
#9. You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.
Nia Long
#10. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#11. All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something.
Michael Kimmelman
#12. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.
Beth Revis
#13. As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing.
Elfriede Jelinek
#14. Do not reflect on the meaning of the word; thinking and reflecting must cease, as all mystical writers insist. Simply "sound" the word silently, letting go of all feelings and thoughts.
Willigis Jager
#15. After 'Nikki' and 'Steve Harvey,' I had written on a show called 'The Oblongs,' which was pretty well respected and had a lot of 'Simpsons' writers on it. So I was a TV writer with an interesting voice at that moment.
Jill Soloway
#16. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#17. I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.
Buffy Andrews
#18. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.
Christy Hall
#19. See, what I don't like listening to is when writers go, 'And then the person cries.' 'Or the person does this.' It's there, but it's not the Bible. I wait and see what happens to me on the day.
Kim Coates
#20. Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.
Fennel Hudson
#21. Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can't for long conceal the toxic spots on your character - Philip Larkin is Exhibit A - nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.
William Giraldi
#22. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#23. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#24. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.
Christy Hall
#25. It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.
Paul McCartney
#26. I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
Gary Shteyngart
#27. 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
#30. You are lovelier than all the roses in the world.
Avijeet Das
#31. I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person.
Hanya Yanagihara
#32. 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
#33. Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.
Julia Cameron
#34. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.
Robin Sacredfire
#35. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#36. Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.
Crystal Evans
#37. I have a well-balanced show. It's 50/50 on men/women, and also African-American/white writers, it's the same thing. I have four African-American writers, and four non-African-American writers.
Wanda Sykes
#38. Most writers agree on the fact that Zen is not to be understood but to be lived; and far from being incompatible with the requirements of everyday life, Zen confers on it its own full revealing value.
Robert Linssen
#39. It is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or acknowledge the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake.
Henry David Thoreau
#40. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo
#41. We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.
Jane Yolen
#42. Love was for dummies, soulmates were the creation of pulp-fiction writers; romance was craved by ageing, lonely cat owners. Successful relationships were built on rationality and compromise.
Karan Bajaj
#44. Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.
Rachel Thompson
#45. The writers keep managing to turn the show in on itself, coming up with something that's well thought-out and miraculous.
Kiefer Sutherland
#46. Now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book?
Dan Savage
#47. I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy ... It's you. You're on. You've got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you've got.
Jonathan Winters
#48. Like actors and writers who are on and off again in terms of employment, I had a very unstructured life.
Buzz Aldrin
#49. Only a true reader will understand how lovely it is to read a book on rainy days.
Nicholaa Spencer
#50. Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#51. I only work with a couple of co-writers who I'm really close with, so they always know what's going on in my life and we talk about things openly, they know every song is true to something that I'm either going through or have gone through before.
LIZ
#53. 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
#54. I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
Christy Hall
#55. Last night I weaved dreams from the cobwebs of time!
Avijeet Das
#56. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
Robert Galbraith
#57. I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us.
Buffy Andrews
#58. The mist after rain, uninterrupted rainfall on rooftops, pitter-patter intellect. The thoughts I leave behind like footsteps.
Chris Campanioni
#59. Imagination is the real magic that exists in this world. Look inwards, to see outwards. And capture it in writing.
Fennel Hudson
#60. More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.
M.V. Carey
#61. I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.
Adolf Hitler
#62. It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.
Antonio Tabucchi
#63. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
Carla H. Krueger
#65. So I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.
Stephen King
#66. 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.
#67. The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
J.M. Coetzee
#68. The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.
Conrad Williams
#69. Poetry has saved me on occasions when people couldn't.
Sanober Khan
#70. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
Ray Bradbury
#71. A pen that has clocked up a million words, a lifetime's memories, is worth more than the centrepiece in a jeweller's window.
Fennel Hudson
#72. Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
Brian A. McBride
#73. I don't think that stuff is gone - I just don't want to dwell on it. There's a difference. As I said, I think we all have tendencies as writers, and I think we all have experience that we bring as readers to each project.
Chang-rae Lee
#74. Before there were books, we read each other.
Lisa Cron
#75. You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K. Chesterton
#76. I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
#77. I consider 'White Collar' my home base. I'm so lucky to get to play a character that's very multifaceted and the writers take risks on and never get into a staid process with.
Matt Bomer
#78. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#79. The night is the balm for the wounded souls of the world.
Avijeet Das
#80. A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things
Matt Groening
#81. ...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
#82. I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale.
Anne McCaffrey
#83. Do you remember the time, Mike," Jeremy laughed, "that you put a banana down your pants and walked up to the Palma-nator. It looked like you had one hell of a hard-on.
Buffy Andrews
#84. Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.
Sherry Thomas
#85. If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.
Jim Rash
#86. Writers wear their skeletons on their sleeves. While the rest of the world locks them in a closet.
Zachary Koukol
#87. Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
Jeanette Winterson
#88. Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#89. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
#90. I've worked with a lot of different producers, a lot of different writers on the album, so I mostly feel like I learned a lot about what I don't want to do the next time around.
Yukimi Nagano
#92. I am the breeze. I drift and I wander. I meet people and i touch their hearts. but people don't stay with me. They leave me. And I keep on drifting and keep on wandering. That's my life.
Avijeet Das
#93. There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do.
Wes Craven
#94. The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
#95. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#96. Capitol Records were very keen for me to write and see how I got on; I think that is what defined my sound. The first session I had was with two young up-and-coming writers, Nick Atkinson and Tom Wilding, and I went into a session a bit nervous because I hadn't written that many songs before.
Shane Filan
#97. Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.
Truman Capote
#98. Reflective writing produces distinct rewards. A writer does not claim to live exclusively in the moment. A pensive writer retreats into oneself in noble attempt to meld memory, thought, faith, doubt, and other strong emotions into thought capsules while exploring the inscrutable web of creation.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#99. A poet's words are like mortar to the bricks of society.
Jason E. Hodges
#100. On the Earth, you admire the Moon; on the Moon, you admire the Earth!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
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