Top 100 Quotes About Great Writers
#1. I think one of the things the writers' festival does that is very good is that it brings writers from around the world and around the country and locally and puts them all in the one spot together, and that's what a lot of the world's great writers' festivals do.
Nick Earls
#2. I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.
Irwin Shaw
#3. Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn't play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.
Stephen Vizinczey
#4. 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
#5. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#6. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#7. Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Craig Raine
#8. 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
#9. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Gertrude Stein
#10. 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
#11. I look for strong people. I don't like people who'll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that's reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to 'The Standard.'
Anna Wintour
#12. Great writers zealously learn the craft of their profession so they can release the power and the depth of their imagination and experience.
Leonard Bishop
#13. Good writers look it up.
Great writers experience it.
Ebony Easter
#14. Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Aaron Sorkin
#15. I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.
Charlie Puth
#16. All great writers begin with a good leather binding and a respectable title.
James M. Barrie
#17. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Just won my first writing award, thanks to you. To all who took the time to vote for me in 50 Great Writers You Should Be Reading, many thanks.
Linda Heavner Gerald
#18. I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.
Patti Smith
#19. Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
Ruth Ozeki
#20. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#21. Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That's a more fruitful way to be.
Mary Karr
#22. The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they're taking us where we don't want to go.
Martin Amis
#23. Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.
Rebecca Miller
#24. The great writers are great as they have big workshop of imagination.
Kishore Bansal
#25. I've been so lucky to work with some great, great writers: Tony Kushner and Yasmina Reza.
Marcia Gay Harden
#26. Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion.
Tony Snow
#27. In America, I am brown; I'm 'of colour', so I would be offered Latin roles, and I've fought against that. I don't want to be put in a category, to be just offered the same sort of thing. For me, it's all about different roles, telling the stories of the great writers.
Santiago Cabrera
#28. All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.
Virginia Woolf
#29. No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. In Jason Fried's book Rework, he writes that one of the smartest investments a business can make is in hiring great writers, and I completely agree. No
Sophia Amoruso
#31. People should think that being a writer is cool. Even if you're just a starving writer. Besides, most great writers were starving at one point or another. It comes with the title.
Zack Love
#32. Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.
Christopher Bollen
#33. The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.
Elias Canetti
#34. People want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it's embarrassing.
Tim Parks
#35. Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.
Charles Bukowski
#36. I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.
Marv Levy
#37. A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#38. It is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.
Erica Jong
#39. I have to say that The Simpsons comes from a huge number of great writers headed by Al Jean, the show-runner, and the work that they do is really fantastic. It's a blast just to sit around with them in the writers' room and listen to all the filthy jokes that will never get on the air.
Matt Groening
#40. I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken that by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.
Adolf Hitler
#41. We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
Allen Ginsberg
#42. I would just like to see hip-hop journalism in general take a step up and match the artistry. There have been great writers in music who are the caliber of artist as a writer as the people that they're covering.
Brother Ali
#43. You can always tell the quality of an author by their cover picture. Bad writers bear an idiotic smile on the inside flap. Great writers take up the entire back cover looking slightly mad, sad, or bored. The very best writers, though, had the superior ability to die before photography was invented.
Bauvard
#44. Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.
Roger Rosenblatt
#45. A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.
Jay McInerney
#46. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.
James A. Michener
#47. It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application.
Terry Eagleton
#48. Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.
Amity Gaige
#49. And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.
Natalie Goldberg
#51. The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.
Azar Nafisi
#52. All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.
Ben Kingsley
#53. All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable ...
Marcel Proust
#54. I knew Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were really talented. As actors, they were both studly young men, and they had great writers' chops.
Robin Williams
#55. Great writers teach as well as entertain.
Beem Weeks
#56. There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.
Rex Stout
#57. Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
Thornton Wilder
#58. all of the great writers drank, except for Kafka and Nietzsche, neither of whom you exactly wanted to be when you grew up.
Anne Lamott
#59. 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
#60. My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.
Grace Paley
#61. I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.
Tom Barbash
#62. All great writers share one thing in common:
They finished their books.
M. Kirin
#63. For sure, without question, the writing is better on TV pound for pound than movies because the businesses have changed so much. So all the great writers would rather work for TV, and they do.
Rob Lowe
#64. All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.
Salman Rushdie
#65. I think great writers should write great shows, and I have trouble with, like, what you are in life shouldn't automatically make you what you do in your art. It doesn't necessarily translate.
Jenji Kohan
#66. I hate to see great writers like Ringel and Ansen and Jan Stuart (among many others) being put out to pastures because print media is suffering.
Alonso Duralde
#67. Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.
Joe Queenan
#68. Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be.
Jeff Daniels
#69. You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Gore Vidal
#70. I'm just in profound gratitude that we get to go back and work on a show that we love, with amazing actors and great writers, and be a part of the Marvel universe. As with all of the characters in Jessica Jones, Trish has an alias.
Rachael Taylor
#71. For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.
Peter Drucker
#72. Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.
Norman Mailer
#73. Linda Heavner Gerald was selected as Winner in 50 Great Writers You Should Be Reading
Linda Heavner Gerald
#74. There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.
Lucas Neff
#75. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.
Elliott Colla
#76. Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.
Ellen J. Barrier
#77. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process.
Mary Norris
#78. Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.
Elizabeth Janeway
#79. I'm with you in Rockland, where we are great writers on this same dreadful typewriter.
Allen Ginsberg
#80. The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
James A. Michener
#81. Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
Zadie Smith
#82. Writers tell you what to think. Great writers make you think.
Chloe Thurlow
#83. Great writers know what to cut out. It's the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.
Donald Miller
#84. I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold great writers. But I'm not insane - I do realise that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation.
Maeve Binchy
#85. Artists, especially writers, great writers, are the most honest people I know. There are deep confessions in their words. And if we're strong enough to expose the spaces between them, we find truths there also.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#86. There's lots of things that can't make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of great writers who don't get published - is it still worthwhile? Aren't we glad people are still doing it?
Dana Spiotta
#87. The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Patti Smith
#88. If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.
A.S. Byatt
#89. All of the great writers and sages we are so quick to quote have simply given their interpretation of what it means to be human.
Chris Matakas
#90. I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
Jay Parini
#91. There're so many great writers out there who aren't getting the exposure they deserve.
Jonathan Evison
#92. All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.
Sam Shepard
#93. Mr. Graves was always using the word weirdo to describe himself and people he liked. He said that all the great writers were "weirdos," too - that our best artists, musicians, and thinkers were first labeled weird in high school or "when they were young." That was "the price of admission.
Matthew Quick
#94. [T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.
Michael D. O'Brien
#95. I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day.
Angela Carter
#97. English literature is a glorious inheritance which is open to all - there are no barriers, no coupons, and no restrictions. In the English language and in its great writers there are great riches and treasures, of which, of course, the Bible and Shakespeare stand along on the highest platform.
Winston Churchill
#98. 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
#99. I'm pleased to have outsold great writers. But I'm not insane - I realize I am a writer people buy to take on vacation.
Maeve Binchy
#100. It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.
Edward St. Aubyn
