Top 100 Story Writers Quotes
#1. I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
M.K. Hobson
#2. My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
Terry Brooks
#3. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
Stephen Graham Jones
#4. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#5. Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.
Will Eisner
#6. A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
Gary Reilly
#8. In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Ray Bradbury
#9. Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met.
Mary Karr
#10. Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.
Walter Kirn
#11. I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Chad Harbach
#12. Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.
Sarah Hall
#13. 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
#14. Accept nothing. Challenge everything.
A.D. Posey
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be.
A.D. Posey
#19. Don't look.
See.
Don't think.
Feel.
Don't hear.
Listen.
Pay attention
Miracles really do happen every day
A.D. Posey
#20. My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.
Ruta Sepetys
#21. Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom.
A.D. Posey
#22. If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#23. It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.
Seeley James
#24. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
Adam Ross
#25. There is nothing like been consumed by the blazing fire of untold story.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#26. I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
George R R Martin
#27. For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
Eudora Welty
#29. I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.
Patrick Ness
#30. All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.
Haniel Long
#31. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#32. I keep the description basic as it allows you to mould the story around your life.
Airam
#33. I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.
Mark Billingham
#34. It's always more than just a story.
A.D. Posey
#35. It's amazing what you can do when you get creative.
A.D. Posey
#36. Your life should reflect your heart.
A.D. Posey
#37. For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.
Carol Bly
#38. Love is the key to everything. Love your life.
A.D. Posey
#39. Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.
Patricia Hampl
#42. The more of those little light bulbs that can turn on the better. Eventually you'll have enough to light up a movie screen.
A.D. Posey
#44. Take a deep breath. Inhale peace. Exhale happiness.
A.D. Posey
#45. Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.
Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.
Mary O'Hara
#46. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#47. What does it mean to write a story of your own life in your head? We all do that whether we are writers or not. We all have a story about who we are: what gender we are, what experiences we have . . . all sorts of stories and narratives we allow ourselves to believe in and create as we go along.
Cyril Wong
#49. I love seeing the light go on in aspiring writers' eyes when you point out ways to improve their prose or their story - when they get it.
F. Paul Wilson
#50. 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
#51. The greatest writers in the world have stolen the greatest Story ever told, time and time again. Christians should recognize this Story and seize the opportunity presented by this towering influence.
Gene C. Fant Jr.
#52. Let your story breathe and be what it really is.
A.D. Posey
#53. The first story I ever sold was to 'Argosy' magazine, which no longer exists. That issue also contained work by several other more celebrated writers, like Ray Bradbury - so I felt I had at least one toe on the ladder.
Wilbur Smith
#54. The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.
Alan Cumming
#55. I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.
Sue Monk Kidd
#56. Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.
Rich Sommer
#57. Things that only a writer would understand - you're writing a character - you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.
Lisa Marbly-Warir
#58. Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree").
John McWhorter
#59. Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.
Julius Schwartz
#60. One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.
Larry Howes
#61. If you have a story inside you but don't know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.
Shanda Trofe
#62. I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.
Alan Rickman
#64. Have the courage to walk in truth, the strength to love always, and the integrity to never stray away from doing so.
A.D. Posey
#66. Surround yourself with those conducive to you being your highest self.
A.D. Posey
#68. With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years.
Melissa Rosenberg
#69. When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.
Chuck Palahniuk
#70. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.
A.D. Posey
#71. Screenwriting is like poker; in the end, you have to go all in.
A.D. Posey
#72. Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.
A.D. Posey
#73. Everything that is old was once new.
A.D. Posey
#74. And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.
Lee Gutkind
#75. If you don't humiliate yourself, you don't live.
A.D. Posey
#76. He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.
Coco J. Ginger
#77. Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I'm telling my story as a political document.
Larry Kramer
#78. The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
Brandt Legg
#79. She meant you have to live a story for a time.'
'And?'
'And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?'
'Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.'
'Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.
L.L. Barkat
#80. Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.
Rebecca Miller
#81. A good preview makes you can't wait to see the whole movie.
A.D. Posey
#82. You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, 'This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!
Christy Hall
#83. Comedians are people who embarrass themselves in style.
A.D. Posey
#84. It's not given even to the greatest writers to tell someone else's story.
Marty Rubin
#85. The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.
Carol Bly
#86. We all just need to be real. That is what will save us.
A.D. Posey
#87. Film is the ultimate canvas, the elixir of art, and the magic of life.
A.D. Posey
#88. Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.
Robert Hass
#89. But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
Charles Nodier
#90. Larger game teams are often a bit more experienced at working with writers, which is often a huge relief. However, it also means that there are more people wanting to wander around the narrative kitchen telling you how you should be making your story pies.
Rhianna Pratchett
#92. How you feel after reading something indicates not what you've read but where you are at.
A.D. Posey
#94. Always let life be wild. Forever have life be interesting.
A.D. Posey
#95. All writers are manipulative liars.
Jack O. Savage, The Poet
Hunter S. Jones
#96. It's interesting because diversity doesn't just happen by garnishing your omelet with a little bit of parsley. Diversity happens because the people that are telling the stories - the writers, directors, storytellers - want to tell their story.
Kelvin Yu
#97. Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.
Stanley Schmidt
#98. I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.
Markus Zusak
#99. Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'
Ayelet Waldman
#100. There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.
Robert Gottlieb
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