Some Writers Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

W. H. Auden

#3. Some writers dug their graves with their own pens

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#4. I never could understand why some writers treat women as helpless. Every woman I know is strong in her own unique way.

Terry Goodkind

#5. Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Gore Vidal

#6. Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing.

Gil Gerard

#7. Some writers are more natural public performers than others; personally I find it quite strange giving interviews. But everyone has parts of their job that they like more than others. You can't complain if you get to do what you love doing most of the time, can you?

Monica Ali

#8. A picture is worth 1,000 megapixels. High-definition (HD) TV images are used to camouflage some writers' low-definition (LD) vocabulary.

John R. Dallas Jr.

#9. Some writers hate to go to trials, but I love trials.

Ann Rule

#10. Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

Edmund White

#11. Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.

Rachel Kushner

#12. Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.

Michael Morpurgo

#13. Some writers write about love; some writers write with love.

Debasish Mridha

#14. There are few words in the music business or in art that I'll say people or some writers are overgenerous with words like 'legend' or 'genius', 'he's a pioneer' and all of that.

Stanley Clarke

#15. Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus.

David Bowker

#16. Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.

Carlos Fuentes

#17. Some writers later, describing the events of that night and day, wrote that Wan'yen of the Altai had seen a spirit-dragon of the river and become afraid. Writers do that sort of thing. They like dragons in their tales.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#18. If you've ever wondered why some writers who, in your humble opinion, don't write as well as you do yet are rich and famous while you struggle onward, this is the reason. They are great directors.

Larry Brooks

#19. There are some writers I think who love to go around and visit bookstores and just interact.

Lincoln Child

#20. Some writers pick a topic and write around that, but I like to include it all.

Sarah Dessen

#21. She felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

Alan Bennett

#22. In the present time you don't really establish what you're going through, but after time it's declared something. Right now there could be some writers doing something expressing their thoughts in a whole different style that we're not aware of. This could be the 'in-between the notes generation.'

Garrett Hedlund

#23. Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.

Ernest Hemingway,

#24. Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

George R R Martin

#25. Some writers would be kinder than others, I'm sure. Hopefully they might describe my techniques as a mixture of tried and tested formulas - if it aint broke don't fix it - and unexpected twists.

Paul Kane

#26. With some writers, the script looks beautiful on the page, but nobody actually speaks like that.

Neve McIntosh

#27. 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

#28. I know some writers can write on the road, but I'm not one of them.

George R R Martin

#29. I value my correspondence with writers ... I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him - he is someone I really like. I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That's enough for me.

Alan Lightman

#30. Some writers like to work in other places like coffee shops, but I can't - I'd end up people-watching. And if I were at a bookstore, I'd be reading. Sometimes I have some music on, but usually I like it quiet.

Julie Kagawa

#31. It's a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#32. Character and Plot ... Character and Plot
Some writers have it and some do not
This I'll tell you Brother
You can't have one without the other

Johnny Flora

#33. Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

V.S. Pritchett

#34. We have some writers so abstruse and deep that they drown themselves in their fathomless sentences.

Josh Billings

#35. I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about - and I think there are some writers who do that - but that hasn't happened to me. I do think it's dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.

Nora Ephron

#36. Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

Alice Walker

#37. Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.

Gene Wolfe

#38. If learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more children would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.

David Elkind

#39. Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.

Scarlett Thomas

#40. Some writers may never create a work. Their purpose is to help others create their first word.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#41. I don't want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process.

G. Willow Wilson

#42. I found out about reviews early on. They're mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That's probably why I'm less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.

Barry Hannah

#43. There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.

Margaret Drabble

#44. Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...

John Geddes

#45. I love actors, and I love the casting process. It's funny, like, some writers don't like actors because, I think, they are the faces of the show, and so you feel sort of secondary, but I love actors because they elevate the material; they make it better.

Bryan Fuller

#46. To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#47. Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

Barry Hannah

#48. I have learned to respect ideas, wherever they come from. Often they come from clients. Account executives often have big creative ideas, regardless of what some writers think.

Leo Burnett

#49. Some writers need to sink in order to feel what their characters feel; in order to write their characters with the truest feeling possible. Those closest to those writers end up feeling the effects of that process. It takes a strong person to be with an emphatic writer.

Lori Goodwin

#50. There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil - this is clear.

Eduardo Galeano

#51. 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

#52. Some writers build a puzzle from the pieces others give to them. Best writers build their own pieces, their own puzzle.

J. A. Pena Fernandez

#53. Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

W. H. Auden

#54. Some writers, rejecting the idea which science had reached, that reefs of rocks could be due in any way to "animalcules," have talked of electrical forces, the first and last appeal of ignorance.

James Dwight Dana

#55. I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."

Renata Adler

#56. Some writers are born. Others learn. I was born a writer but have a lot to learn.

Donna Lynn Hope

#57. There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

Heidi Julavits

#58. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)

James Wood

#59. Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.

Roy Kesey

#60. I think there's a fine line between being so obtuse that you lose the reader completely, which is the intention for some writers, though it isn't mine. I work hard at grounding the world as much as possible in the world we do recognize.

Laurie Foos

#61. Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

Emma Donoghue

#62. While it's true that some writers, when taking on love and war, find the task too big, or only succeed in one but not the other, Mengestu tracks both themes with authority and feeling.

Meg Wolitzer

#63. Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

V.S. Naipaul

#64. Don't let your characters tell you what to do. They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds.

Chelsea Cain

#65. Some writers, of course, simply write, as they feel they are driven to do, by outer/inner inspirations. If, after the work is written and, hopefully, published, others respond
that is the Champagne. But we, or some of us, don't write for the Champagne. We write because we write.

Tanith Lee

#66. Hollywood, to hear some writers tell it, is the place where they take an author's steak tartare and make cheeseburger out of it. Upon seeing the film, they say, the author promptly cuts his throat, bleeding to death in a pool of money.

Fletcher Knebel

#67. Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#68. Some writers research in order to write. I write in order to research topics that interest me. Especially if I can meet with other people, in forums from illness support groups to phone-sex hotlines, and learn what other people know best.

Chuck Palahniuk

#69. I've heard a lot of great success stories from writers - how so many of them struggled to get where they are and how persistence pays off. I learned that some writers are good at doing readings and some are not so good at it.

Kevin Sampsell

#70. Some writers aren't writers, they are mere escapees' and refugees' on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#71. I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'

Margaret Atwood

#72. I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

Yann Martel

#73. Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.

Italo Calvino

#74. Some writers maintain arithmetic to be only the only sure guide in political economy; for my part, I see so many detestable systems built upon arithmetical statements, that I am rather inclined to regard that science as the instrument of national calamity.

Jean-Baptiste Say

#75. 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

#76. Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.

T.C. Boyle

#77. 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

#78. Some of the greatest writers in our industry can't get work.

Kent McCord

#79. If you're a politician it's very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.

Michael Pollan

#80. I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character's sexuality is fascinating. It's a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it's such a personal thing.

Alan Ball

#81. Always do the things fast in your life, because some things are coming from the future towards you; they may separate you forever from doing the things you want to do! Never forget, some things are coming from the future, be fast!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#82. I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

Penelope Wilton

#83. The world has obviously changed in terms of the way filmmakers and actors and writers often look at their own careers. They all seem to want to include in their own process - along with some of their iconic and franchise-driven movies.

Mark Canton

#84. The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.

Sara Sheridan

#85. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

#86. Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that "women aren't funny." Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.

Tina Fey

#87. Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot

#88. I enjoyed needling the press. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't have done it. Writers have rarely played, so as a coach, you have antagonistic feelings about some guy writing up the story of the game who's never even attempted to play it.

Bobby Knight

#89. What we need is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that.

Kathleen Turner

#90. As much as I thought the end of 'Friday Night Lights' was a really great ending, I was one of those people who wanted to make it into a movie. Even though it ultimately didn't work to do that movie, I did work with some of the other writers and by myself writing a script for that.

Jason Katims

#91. It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.

John Leonard

#92. Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.

Joe Queenan

#93. Completing any writing project, particularly a novel, is a daunting prospect. Many people become frozen by the prospect. Others keep waiting for the right time. Some wait for the spark of inspiration. Even experienced writers find it is easier to do anything other than actually write.

Bob Mayer

#94. I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.

Jonathan Lethem

#95. The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.

Sahara Sanders

#96. Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

Toni Morrison

#97. As much as we love each other, there is some growing difficulty in my adult relationship with my father. Because we're both writers, we're having a very intimate conversation in a very public forum.

Natasha Trethewey

#98. And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.

Stanley Schmidt

#99. Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.

Ralph Bakshi

#100. I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

David Mitchell