Quotes About Young Writers

#1. 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

#2. These young writers nowadays. They spend more time networking to promote their writing careers than writing their books. Maybe that's why there are so few good ones anymore.

Lauren Carr

#3. I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

Irvine Welsh

#4. What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings.

Marlon James

#5. 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

#6. There's no path to being a writer that's applicable to everyone. Some young writers have the fortitude to work in a vacuum. For me, it was important to have some sense that my failures weren't unique.

Jonathan Dee

#7. Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

Robert Morgan

#8. Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself.

Mary Karr

#9. So, I say to you, young writers: You only need one person to believe in you, even if that person is yourself. And I say to you, old writers, and there's a hell of a lot of you in here,

Claire Contreras

#10. As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.

Janet Fitch

#11. Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

Robert Boswell

#12. I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

John Updike

#13. There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

Eleanor Catton

#14. I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

Pat Conroy

#15. Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another."
Hemingway's advice to other young writers in "A Moveable Feast.

Ernest Hemingway,

#16. Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#17. They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

John O'Hara

#18. Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

John Green

#19. Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

Paddy Chayefsky

#20. My advice to young writers is, if you can't marry money, at least don't marry envy.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#21. I often meet frustrated young writers who say they've only got so far and just can't finish a book. Even if you don't happen to use what you've worked on that day, it has taught you something and you'll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again.

Eoin Colfer

#22. I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

Manuel Puig

#23. When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.

John Banville

#24. When I talk to students or young writers about the importance of being unafraid to take controversial positions, I'm struck by the degree to which they can't entertain a thought, much less commit one to paper, without imagining the cacophony of snark they'll get in response.

Meghan Daum

#25. Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable.

William Strunk Jr.

#26. I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

Ray Bradbury

#27. Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

Daniel Handler

#28. I do a lot of teaching ... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive.

Erica Jong

#29. I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.

John Philip Sousa

#30. The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

Diane Wakoski

#31. A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

#32. In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough.

Flannery O'Connor

#33. Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

Tom Stoppard

#34. There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.

Jonathan Ames

#35. Read Jerrod Edson. He is one of our best young writers.

David Adams Richards

#36. A lot of young writers wait for inspiration. The inspiration only hits you at the desk.

Robert Anderson

#37. All of us ambitious young writers hoped to have a cover story in Esquire, of course. The idea was to write the best, most entertaining article that you can.

Laurence Shames

#38. A lot of young writers are very precious about their words. Don't be - you've got to be ready to burn stuff. You're not as good as you think you are, at least not yet.

Josh Lieb

#39. I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

Lee Smith

#40. Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.

Patrick Kavanagh

#41. Young writers take themselves very seriously in college.

Kyle Kinane

#42. There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.

Anne Enright

#43. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Lillian Hellman

#44. What is your advice to young writers?"
"Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.

Charles Bukowski

#45. It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.

George Murray

#46. With the young writers now it's F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

Margaret Atwood

#47. Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

Robert Morgan

#48. I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers.
(1945)

Albert Camus

#49. Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

Zadie Smith

#50. She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators. For books are food, she said, for every single one of us.

Pete Hamill

#51. There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

J.B. Priestley

#52. I have seen too many young writers give up because they couldn't handle the repeated failures their profession threw at them. They had talent, but they lacked determination and resilience. Marina had all three, and that's why I am certain she would have succeeded.

Marina Keegan

#53. Young writers need to be encouraged to write - just write - with no restrictions on form, style or content.

Kelley Armstrong

#54. I always talk to young writers about when you make art in your room, you make art. And when you send it to New York and L.A., you have to be a professional. Of course, when you sell your book rights as an option for a movie, you have to be a professional about that.

Matthew Quick

#55. I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

Robert Morgan

#56. I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

David Foster Wallace

#57. Young writers should definitely research the current sounds and styles.

Lamont Dozier

#58. I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at.

Anne Tyler

#59. INTERVIEWER:
What specific piece of advice would you give to young writers?

MALAMUD:
Write your heart out.

Bernard Malamud

#60. I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

Paul Auster

#61. The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

W. Somerset Maugham

#62. Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.

Poppy Z. Brite

#63. The beating of drums, which delights young writers who serve a party, sounds to him who does not belong to the party line like a rattling of chains, and excites sympathy rather than admiration.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#64. There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.

Elizabeth McCracken

#65. Young writers reasonably say, 'I don't know what to write about,' so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin.

Susanna Moore

#66. There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.

David Mitchell

#67. When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.

Aaron Sorkin

#68. 'Skins' had been a brilliant breeding ground for young actors, young directors and young writers. It was a safe environment to experiment; it tried new things, and it was an amazing time and amazing to be part of it.

Joe Dempsie

#69. Success breeds volume, and it's just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.

Steven Curtis Chapman

#70. The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

Dorothy Allison

#71. 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

#72. What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

John D'Agata

#73. 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

#74. Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

Cameron Crowe

#75. Capitol Records were very keen for me to write and see how I got on; I think that is what defined my sound. The first session I had was with two young up-and-coming writers, Nick Atkinson and Tom Wilding, and I went into a session a bit nervous because I hadn't written that many songs before.

Shane Filan

#76. Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

Marguerite Young

#77. Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.

George Saunders

#78. I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I'd like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people's lives.

John F. Kerry

#79. I always crave to see more stories about and by people of color, particularly new work by young black writers.

Katori Hall

#80. Boozing does not necessarily have to go hand in hand with being a writer ... I therefore solemnly declare to all young men trying to become writers that they do not actually have to become drunkards first.

Nelson W. Aldrich

#81. All I really want to do today is go to the book store, drink coffee and read.

Ann Marie Frohoff

#82. Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Margaret Atwood

#83. I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

Paul Auster

#84. I find it always pleasurable talking with young people, particularly those aspiring to be writers, out of nostalgia, and because I've always felt that we oldies can learn so much from them and draw from them inspiration in our flagging and rickety years.

F. Sionil Jose

#85. I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

Rachel Kushner

#86. What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.

Camille Paglia

#87. As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward.

Lydia Sigourney

#88. I think a lot of young aspiring writers get misdirected; they think 'I ought to write this, even though I enjoy reading that'. What you have to do is write what you enjoy reading.

Jeffery Deaver

#89. Alafair Burke is one of the finest young crime writers working today.

Lisa Unger

#90. Television and cable have become the new independent films, in a sense, for writers and actors to gravitate towards. That's why I like short films, too; I love doing readings, audio books, working with young filmmakers; anything that keeps you from getting blase about yourself or in a rut.

Campbell Scott

#91. I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewriter smoke in order to keep eating.

Hugh B. Cave

#92. I like to encourage young talented writers to try and help them get published and so forth, but that's all. That's the best I can do.

Oscar Hijuelos

#93. My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

Erica Jong

#94. A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonist's taste in music, or we're told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.

Peter Temple

#95. When I was a kid, the people of my generation didn't want to be writers, they wanted to be rock stars. Rock and roll was not just entertainment, it was the center of people's lives. When I was young, it was exciting and interesting.

Fran Lebowitz

#96. 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

#97. I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

K.A. Applegate

#98. Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

David Foster Wallace

#99. It only takes a tenth grade course on evolution to know that the prostate g-spot's existence alone is proof that ass play has been done for a very, very long time.

Maggie Young

#100. The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not.

Jamaica Kincaid