Quotes About Writer's Voice

#1. The writer's voice, the honesty and candor that is present in that voice, is what must be written upon the page.

Edmond Rostand

#2. Aunt Lovey used to tell me that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed a writer's voice. 'Read,' she'd say, 'and if you have a writer's voice, one day it will shout out, 'I can do that too!

Lori Lansens

#3. I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer's voice and the writer's point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.

Wesley Morris

#4. First we get the rocks out, Alice. Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer's voice rises. No harm done.

Mary Norris

#5. I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

Paula Fox

#6. A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.

Patricia Lee Gauch

#7. And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#8. I think I'm a good writer. I think I have my own voice, which is unique to everyone - everyone has their own voice; if they would just write from a vulnerable embarrassing place, it's going to be universal, and it's going to be entertaining. Because everyone is the same, and everyone is unique.

Nicole Holofcener

#9. Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.

Henry Louis Gates

#10. Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.

Ronald Kessler

#11. I was only ever part of 'Lost' - a very small part of an extremely talented writers' room, where as a writer, it's sort of your job to sublimate your ego and work in the service of the show and the show's voice.

Brian K. Vaughan

#12. Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#13. It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Natalie Goldberg

#14. Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

Jeff Lindsay

#15. In truth, age is a writer's ally. The greater the experience, the more we have to say. More time to learn important truths, to establish a more expansive point of view, to refine skills and find your voice, and infinitely more stories to be told.

Randy Kraft

#16. I think the only way you can become a writer is through honing your voice, creating your own voice.

Megan McCafferty

#17. The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.

Susan Sontag

#18. The point of freewriting is to get past the voice inside your head that tells you your ideas aren't good enough, your words aren't good enough, you're no writer and so forth.

M. Molly Backes

#19. The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.

Meghan Daum

#20. I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer.

Patricia Hickman

#21. I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your 'voice' is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices.

Ellen Potter

#22. The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

Aharon Appelfeld

#23. It's the originality of Pauls Toutonghi's voice and vision that makes this such a remarkable novel. Toutonghi is a true daredevil of a writer, and this fantastically hilarious and affecting book will have you on the edge of your seat.

Skip Horack

#24. I write to express myself, I write to be a voice for those who can not speak I write to inspire change in positive ways I write in hope to make a difference After I have giving up the ghost I would have written to leave my foot prints behind

Ocean Crisstopher Poet

#25. You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.

Henry Miller

#26. It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.

Jacqueline Carey

#27. I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

Grace Paley

#28. The film industry sees the writer as fungible: The thinking goes, As long as we have Brad Pitt and all this money, we have a great film! No, you need a writer with voice and an engaging story, or what you have is a bomb.

Melissa Rosenberg

#29. I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

Sara Zarr

#30. When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really.

Noah Hawley

#31. It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.

Andrea Hirata

#32. We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

Lynne Truss

#33. A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

Quentin Tarantino

#34. The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Aberjhani

#35. If you really want to find your voice, your goal is to journey toward inner wholeness
which is what life is about anyway. It involves self-acceptance and genuine self-respect.
from Unleash the Writer Within

Cecil Murphey

#36. Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

Willa Cather

#37. You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.

David Morrell

#38. Authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer ...

John Geddes

#39. We stopped looking in the shadows, when we realised that WE were the monsters that we are afraid of. I want to take these monsters, give them a voice and put them back under our beds, in our closets and in the shadows, back where we are most afraid of them.

Rob Shepherd

#40. Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

Jennifer Weiner

#41. I think it's amazing to have one writer write every episode of a series. It's very rare, I think. You get a voice that continues.

Harry Treadaway

#42. Read a ton, write every day if you can, and don't mimic another writer's style. Find your own voice.

James Patterson

#43. Zachary Jernigan's short stories are in deep conversation with the history of the genre while maintaining a thoroughly modern sensibility. Here's a new writer who has found his voice. Listen to him and enjoy!

James Patrick Kelly

#44. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now ?

Dana Gioia

#45. The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

Mo Yan

#46. Genuine bravery for a writer ... It is about calmly speaking the truth when everyone else is silenced, when the truth cannot be expressed. It is about speaking out with a different voice, risking the wrath of the state and offending everyone, for the sake of the truth, and the writer's conscience.

Murong Xuecun

#47. I could say that in the essay, as it has developed historically, success is determined by the writer's ability to express, through an individual voice, a collective experience - you are speaking individually but you are representing collectively.

Vijay Seshadri

#48. Every writer has his own voice. Other than that I'm always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven't always been happy about that.

Dean Koontz

#49. William Dalrymple has superseded Mark Tully as the voice of India ... He may well be the greatest travel writer of his generation.

Robert Twigger

#50. I don't think it is possible to give tips for finding one's voice; it's one of those things for which there aren't really any tricks or shortcuts, or even any advice that necessarily translates from writer to writer. All I can tell you is to write as much as possible.

Poppy Z. Brite

#51. I always wanted to find my voice and claim my tone, but I was doing it through the steps of being a TV writer. I had the executive producer title. I was running the room.

Jill Soloway

#52. A bad handwriting is as annoying to a reader ... as an irritating voice is to a listener.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#53. As a writer I want everybody to get a chance to voice their opinions. If each character thinks that they're telling the truth, then it's valid. Then at the end of the film, I leave it up to the audience to decide who did the right thing.

Spike Lee

#54. Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.

Salman Rushdie

#55. I've always suffered from being labelled a horror writer - just because I didn't go to university, just because I still talk in my natural voice, just because I'm not as articulate as Martin Amis.

James Herbert

#56. Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler.

Oscar Wilde

#57. What's your job?" He looked blank. "I've forgotten ... "
"I'm a writer. A novelist."
"Maybe that explains why you were going to hell," Raziel said in a wry voice.

Kristina Douglas

#58. The pages afforded glimpses into my soul where I'd hidden it, behind masks of paper and ink.

Rachel L. Schade

#59. Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech. We must be intensely private and interior in order to find a voice and a vision - and we must bring our work to an outside world where the market, or public outrage, or even government censorship can destroy our voice.

Sara Paretsky

#60. If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Fennel Hudson

#61. What you produce as a writer is art. A voice that opens a vein and leaves the reader lapping at the blood that's been drawn.

H.N. Sieverding

#62. As a writer and director, I want to know what is behind the good manners and soft voice. Who is inside the silhouette?

Federico Fellini

#63. I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

Jason Robert Brown

#64. I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.

Frank Black

#65. A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we control what we want to write about.

Horton Foote

#66. If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

#67. I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.

Jane Green

#68. I try to transmit emotion and soul in my voice, but my true passion has always been writing. I feel more like a writer than anything else.

Romeo Santos

#69. I am not a writer, but I feel that when our production company is successful, we'll be able to give some young writers with fresh voices an opportunity to put their work out there.

Viola Davis

#70. The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.

Scott Turow

#71. I didn't really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y'know? And a world I could call my own.

Tom Waits

#72. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.

Mordecai Richler

#73. One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

Quentin Tarantino

#74. If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

Kate Atkinson

#75. 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

#76. I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

John Darnielle

#77. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

E.L. Doctorow

#78. It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.

Colleen McCullough

#79. Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

Steve Toltz

#80. Any writer takes inspiration from what they read and watch, and over their career works on forming their own voice. I think it was probably Stephen King who made me want to become a writer.

Tim Lebbon

#81. Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.

E.L. Doctorow

#82. Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.

William Zinsser

#83. To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

Deborah Levy

#84. What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.

John Mortimer

#85. From Maya Angelou I began to believe that I, too, someday, could be a writer, and I also learned how tortuous it can be to be in possession of a unique voice.

Dirk Benedict

#86. Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.

Philip Kitcher

#87. What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.

Jacques Barzun

#88. I think having women behind the cameras is exciting - whether it's as a director or a writer or a producer - because it does feel like we're in the middle of this awakening of realizing that it's important for women to have a voice.

Mary Elizabeth Ellis

#89. Having an attack of self-doubt about your writing ability?

Step #1 - Tell yourself - 'I'm the best damn writer there is, and the world deserves to hear my voice.'

Step #2 - Repeat Step #1 until you believe it.

Jonathan Maas

#90. With iPhones, nobody has an excuse for writer's block. If you're at Whole Foods getting your green tea extract and you have a melody, you just drop it into your voice memo and save it for later.

Ryan Tedder

#91. As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.

Adam Schlesinger

#92. Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

John Irving

#93. Highway One, Antarctica is a wonderful debut by a writer with razor-sharp insights to the human condition. Justin Herrmann is a voice I hope to hear more from, and soon. Excellent collection.

Jo-Ann Mapson

#94. I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves.

J. A. Jance

#95. He would catapult you forward, and that was his intention with the Jazz Messengers. He would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

Benny Green

#96. Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that people can only do certain things.

Dhani Jones

#97. When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That's my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.

David Suchet