Quotes About Writers

#1. Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work.

Lytton Strachey

#2. Ilike ideas writers have that I might not have written. Writers are there for a reason ... to write for me.

Tim Roth

#3. Writers don't write writing, they write reading. When I was a kid, I read four or five books a week. And that is how I became a writer.

Avi

#4. Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone

John Updike

#5. I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.

Jim Crace

#6. Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.

Steven Spielberg

#7. Jane Austen can in fact get more drama out of morality than most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem.

Ronald Blythe

#8. Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

Sara Sheridan

#9. No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Aubrey Beardsley

#10. Memoirists collect experiences in an attempt to capture the fluttery thing we call life.
---from Blog-"Readers, Writers and Pumpkin Pie

Peggy Barnes

#11. Well, so far, at least, my own ideas always take priority over those of other writers. As long as the well doesn't run dry, I imagine this will be the case.

Todd Solondz

#12. Let's face it, the great comedians now that are handicapped in the looks department are tremendous writers.

Jack Black

#13. I think one of the things I was shocked about was how interested the world is in 'American Idol' and how people, writers, they write about 'Idol' all the time, and I guess I didn't expect that.

Nicki Minaj

#14. I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

Tony Kushner

#15. I've always thought that a lot of really good writers go wrong by getting so into the craft and the technique and perfection. Perfection can be the enemy sometimes. Some songs don't need to be told perfectly. Life is messy and has loose ends, and sometimes I think the songs should reflect that.

Patterson Hood

#16. Writers don't have bad life days; they just have good research days.

Julie Wright

#17. I became convinced that almost all the priests of that religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in my former dissipated and military life;

Leo Tolstoy

#18. In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

Dan Chaon

#19. Probably the biggest temptation that young writers face is to be entertaining, to show your bag of tricks and do a bit of tap dancing. I read a lot of things, and I keep seeing this brocade of voice where someone is trying to be too pally with you or ingratiating on the page.

Teju Cole

#20. I write every day, including weekends. For writers, there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.

Janet Fitch

#21. When you're a big enough part of the process that the Writers Guild gives you a lot of credit, that's a good thing. It tells me that I've had a significant impact on the film as a writer.

Harold Ramis

#22. I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

Gillian Flynn

#23. All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

Kurt Vonnegut

#24. I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'

Orhan Pamuk

#25. I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.

Claire Messud

#26. I do not set specific work hours as some writers do. I generally stay with a chapter until I am satisfied, do very little rewriting, and if a scene is going well, I've been known to keep night owl hours.

Sharon Kay Penman

#27. After kids leave the house, they can decide to do whatever they want, but while they're under my roof, they're going to be lawyers or writers or something, something important, anything except actors.

John Leguizamo

#28. 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

#29. As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#30. Words writers choose are a glimmering reflection into our souls.

Lee Bice-Matheson

#31. I like writers who can show me worlds I know nothing about, but my favorites are those who create characters or worlds which feel realistic and familiar to me, or who can make me feel inspired.

Malala Yousafzai

#32. It is critical that writers who embrace the light of Christ's redemptive love characterize the darkness arrayed against us in a way that is consistent with its true nature.

Ted Dekker

#33. You can take wonderfully talented actors, wonderfully talented writers and producers, and, uh, do a wonderful show! ... but if it doesn't hit with the public in two minutes, it's bye-bye.

Charlotte Rae

#34. Actors are good liars, writers are good liars with good memories.

Daniel Keys Moran

#35. The male author unthinkingly creates a world in which every single member of society is male except - hey presto! - when the protagonist feels like getting laid. Especially common in science fiction; apparently many writers assume that in the future women will die out.

Howard Mittelmark

#36. I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers' retreat Xanadu, what he'd done during the war, which he called 'civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide,

Kurt Vonnegut

#37. I'm truly grateful to the writers of Fringe for giving me that because, over the years, when I've spoken about the character with them, I've always felt that this would be the perfect way to end and complete his journey, and to complete the journey of this series, and they gave it to me.

John Noble

#38. I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.

Harvey Pekar

#39. It's not that [writers] are pompous jerks. We are insecure. We feel like we're fading away in this vast sea of scriveners.

William Browning Spencer

#40. The '70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.

Ann Leckie

#41. To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.

Walter Benjamin

#42. The greatest writers have persistence.

Gina B. Nahai

#43. I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

Sara Sheridan

#44. I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay.

Donald Ray Pollock

#45. And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

Nic Pizzolatto

#46. Today, writers want to impress other writers.

Paulo Coelho

#47. To put it simply, we think books are too important to leave to writers, and we want the wisest, most experienced, most knowledgeable people on earth to be able to effectively and easily share their wisdom with the world.

Tucker Max

#48. Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.

William, Saroyan

#49. Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Andre Maurois

#50. I like to hear from my readers, and I like to feel like I'm part of a bigger community of readers and writers.

Maggie Stiefvater

#51. I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

John Irving

#52. Writing, at its best and truest, can offer solace and salvation for both readers and writers.

Roxane Gay

#53. There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

Carrie Coon

#54. For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Nicholson Baker

#55. If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.

John Dos Passos

#56. The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?

Peter Morgan

#57. The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.

William Devane

#58. It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.

Antony Beevor

#59. Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before.

Matt Groening

#60. Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Carl Reiner

#61. Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

Florence King

#62. But the Russian writers would be packed away in mothballs and stored in our basement. I would savor the idea of Dostoevsky's, Tolstoy's and Gorki's volumes molding in the dank cellar, wisps of camphor and odors of wet earth floating above them. I

Maya Angelou

#63. In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Salman Rushdie

#64. The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#65. In a world that devalues creativity, writers stand in a courageous place.

Greg Sushinsky

#66. virus writers lack the basic social and moral values and the "well-formed consciousness" that are the hallmarks of civilized modern societies.

Peter H. Gregory

#67. Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.

Diana Trilling

#68. Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing.

Judith Rossner

#69. I don't know how it is with other writers, but most of the time when I finish [reading] a story or novel, I may be pleased, I may even be impressed, but somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking, I can do that.

F. Paul Wilson

#70. They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.

Vivian Gornick

#71. As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.

Stephen Gaghan

#72. When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

Umberto Eco

#73. I guess I'm not jaded because I still believe that there are good films out there, and there are great directors, and there are great writers. It just takes a little bit more perseverance and a little bit more time to find [them].

Elijah Wood

#74. Any writer of horror needs to at least have a good, solid love of the genre. Also, good horror writers need to have a slightly twisted sense of humor. Without humor, horror just isn't as good.

Alistair Cross

#75. I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since then has just been repetition. A lot of it is marvelous but the forms haven't changed.

Pankaj Mishra

#76. Musicians have blocks, just like writers do. You'll find your muse again.

Colleen Hoover

#77. Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

Lillian Hellman

#78. That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

Edward Hirsch

#79. I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them, I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine.

N.K. Jemisin

#80. (Jack London)"He was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been . . . the excellence of his short stories has been almost forgotten.

George Orwell

#81. I think the writers of 'Community' have moved on from my character. I'm pretty sure. I would love to go back on. I had a really good time and I really liked that character, but I don't think it's going to happen.

Eliza Coupe

#82. There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.

Karl Kraus

#83. For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Russell Banks

#84. Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

Henry Louis Gates

#85. With enough use, practice, and honing of skill, words were the weapons of choice used by exceptional writers and poets. Minds can be changed, hearts can be lost and broken, souls can be surrendered given the right words.

Penny Reid

#86. The artists are the most powerful ones, the creators, first are the painters, working without words, second are the music composers, and third are the writers.

Robert Black

#87. The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with ... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

Will Self

#88. I certainly think it's very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them.

Vikram Seth

#89. 'Wings' was a blessing, but it was also very difficult. Whenever you do situation comedy, no matter how excellent the execution - and we had a great cast and great writers - but the format is somewhat limited.

Tim Daly

#90. Writers must ... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

Mary Oliver

#91. Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

Charles Bukowski

#92. Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It's not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.

Graham Joyce

#93. I like to always wash the slate clean, and reinvigorate my spirit to be connected to the characters that I am doing. I am finding new ways to allow myself to soar beyond the parameters of what the writers have written. My key is to commit, and love your character.

Giancarlo Esposito

#94. Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas.

Criss Jami

#95. I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

Cynthia Ozick

#96. Creativity. Inspiration. We worship them here, Donald. They are our guidance, and we revere them. Do you understand? Revere them. So many people think that writers merely sit down and string together words and poof! a piece of writing. Not so!

David Bischoff

#97. Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

Anais Nin

#98. They say that writers face the blank page. That's not true. It's more like 200 hundred blank pages!

R.S. Mellette

#99. I'm inspired by artists and musicians. There are so many wonderful and talented people in the world. I love discovering new music, new writers, or new art.

Alicia Keys

#100. I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.

Ellen DeGeneres