Quotes About Writerly

#1. My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

James Patterson

#2. I think it's fair to say I am a writer. I'm using this journal to get better: to hone my skills, to collect details and observations. To show don't tell and all that other writerly crap.

Gillian Flynn

#3. Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it's a more inviting one.

Steven Pinker

#4. I love writing on trains. The joy of being a writer is it's all in your head; you don't need materials apart from the laptop. It's like taking your work home with you, so you can feel grounded in your own insane writerly realities wherever you are.

Sadie Jones

#5. I was first a reader and without readers what would be the point in writing. For those of you who love a good story, thank you for being willing to read what we writerly folk create.

Michelle Dennis Evans

#6. I would trade any writerly success if it would mean my children would be happy.

Mary Gordon

#7. One thing that's always helped quell my writerly anxieties is seeking out interviews with writers I admire.

Molly Antopol

#8. Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

Amy Hempel

#9. You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

Chuck Palahniuk

#10. Big, evocative words get thrown around, and people can sing along to passionately as if the lyrics just materialized out of the ether, largely because they don't ever seem to coalesce into a writerly voice.

Dan Bejar

#11. I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.

Nicholson Baker

#12. I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

Anne Tyler

#13. I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#14. Keep Reading.
Keep Writing.
Keep Pushing yourself!
And never stop learning!
We writerly types have to stick together mostly because everybody else thinks we're "weird".

Darynda Jones

#15. My writerly aspirations are pretty simple: to provide as many readers as possible with the same sort of wonderful immersion that I myself get from fantasy novels - and to make enough money to help feed my kids while doing so.

Saladin Ahmed

#16. I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

Zadie Smith

#17. People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

Brian Reynolds Myers

#18. When it grows dark, we always need someone. This thought, the product of anxiety, only comes to me in the evenings, just when I'm about to end my writerly explorations.

Enrique Vila-Matas

#19. No one ever accepts criticism so cheerfully. Neither the man who utters it nor the man who invites it really means it.

R.K. Narayan

#20. If someone should ask, "how should an Opposition function?" the best answer would be, "in the manner of a traditional mother-in-law who watches the performance of household work by a daughter-in-law and follows her about with her comments.

R.K. Narayan

#21. Prince Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna, and thousands died for it.

George R R Martin

#22. A helping word to one in trouble is often like a switch on a railroad track-an inch between wreck and smooth-rolling prosperity.

Henry Ward Beecher

#23. If I don't write it, they can't buy it.

Connie Cox

#24. A brand is a person that has a voice, evokes emotion and spreads a message.

Richie Norton

#25. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

John Steinbeck

#26. Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

Jo Deurbrouck

#27. We always question the bonafides of the man who tells us unpleasant facts.

R.K. Narayan

#28. There is victory in surrender.

Shonda Rhimes