Top 100 Quotes About Writers
#1. It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.
Pattiann Rogers
#2. I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.
Julia Glass
#3. 'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.
Terrence McNally
#4. You can give your message to anybody, to everybody, from anywhere, from everywhere, in every way possible. The only thing you have to consider is this: Let your message be simple and understandable!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#5. There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.
Michael Anti
#6. But however imperfect, even repugnant, were particular policies, particular actions, there remained the purity of the ideal, represented in the theories of Karl Marx and the noble visions of many lesser thinkers and writers.
Howard Zinn
#7. [Writers] should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
E.B. White
#8. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
Tim Cahill
#10. Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.
Lynn Abbey
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
Dinaw Mengestu
#14. ... unpacked her books, her sweet delight in happier days, and her soothing resource in the hours of moderate sorrow: but there were hours when even these failed of their effect; when the genius, the taste, the enthusiasm of the sublimest writers were felt no longer.
Ann Radcliffe
#15. Nobody thinks mystery writers go around killing people, but they always seem to assume singers are singing about themselves, especially if you write melancholy songs like me.
Del Shannon
#16. You can curse the darkness, or you can dispel it.
A.D. Posey
#17. All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something.
Michael Kimmelman
#18. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham
#19. All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
Jesse Kellerman
#20. Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
Richard Price
#21. His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#22. Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde
#23. We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#26. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.
Dara Horn
#27. Cherish every relationship in your life. There are certain things in life that can't be fixed if broken!
Avijeet Das
#28. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#29. Accept nothing. Challenge everything.
A.D. Posey
#30. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#31. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#32. 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
#33. Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.
Fay Weldon
#34. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.
Patrick Rothfuss
#38. It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.
Rachel Weisz
#39. 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
#41. Readers & Writers Connect By Finding One Another
R.J. Harries
#42. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#43. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
Dean Wesley Smith
#44. Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.
Martin Amis
#45. I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.
Buffy Andrews
#46. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.
Christy Hall
#47. My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.
Caitlin Flanagan
#48. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
#49. The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
#50. Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
Rudy Rucker
#51. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
Linwood Barclay
#52. 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
#53. Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.
Irwin Shaw
#54. I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.
Irwin Shaw
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways.
Sandra Cisneros
#58. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?
Martijn Benders
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn't play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.
Stephen Vizinczey
#63. Style! style! why, all writers will tell you that it is the very thing which can least of all be changed. A man's style is nearly as much a part of him as his physiognomy, his figure, the throbbing of this pulse,
in short, as any part of his being is at least subjected to the action of the will.
Isaac D'Israeli
#64. There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.
Stephen Daldry
#65. The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.
Colin Wilson
#66. 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
#67. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.
John Scalzi
#68. So I'm happiest when I'm working with artists and writers, and involved in stories, whether we're talking about animation or movies or comics or television.
Stan Lee
#69. Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#70. Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
#71. Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.
Lauren Tarshis
#72. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#73. There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU.
Pandora Gray
#74. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.
Christy Hall
#75. Writers are diffident creatures
they need encouragement.
Agatha Christie
#76. Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.
Tom Bissell
#77. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
P.D. James
#78. The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'
Roger Ebert
#79. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.
Anthony Trollope
#80. I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.
D.A. Botta
#81. Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.
Jeffery Deaver
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker
#85. We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.
Anais Nin
#86. One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.
Kathy Reichs
#87. So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us.
Natalie Goldberg
#88. Crafty writers ... don't allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#89. Some of the greatest writers in our industry can't get work.
Kent McCord
#90. So I made a request. I said to the writers, I have a minor request that I just want to play a loser.
Justin Long
#92. Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.
Randi Pink
#93. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.
Louis L'Amour
#94. Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term.
Richard Whately
#96. 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
#97. The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#98. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut
#99. You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be.
A.D. Posey
#100. How many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely ...
John Geddes
