The Writer Quotes

#1. There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets ... when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

Charles Bukowski

#2. Editing requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important, for example, not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes that's hard.

Robert Gottlieb

#3. Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough

Joy Williams

#4. I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually is to be found only in the minds of people about to be executed in the next half hour.

Maya Angelou

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

Mo Yan

#6. The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

Boris Pasternak

#7. Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

Roberto Bolano

#8. Gos had steely pinions and a mad marigold eye, and hopped and flew and mantled his great wings over a fist of raw liver. He cheeped like a songbird and was terrified of cars. I liked Gos. Gos was comprehensible, even if the writer was utterly beyond understanding.

Helen Macdonald

#9. Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

Haruki Murakami

#10. It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

Ferdinand Christian Baur

#11. Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty ... It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.

Russell T. Davies

#12. When you get a bad review, you hate the writer. It's very painful; whoever says the opposite lies. It's humiliating. Sometimes it comes from an honest place, but most times, it comes from a desire to trash someone.

Thomas Vinterberg

#13. The exchange of words is a lot like a virtual handshake. Is the writer's grasp of the language strong and bold? Are the words gripping? Direct? Inventive? Sincere?

Allison Mackie

#14. It's sometimes hard to know who's choosing whom - the poem, the song, or the writer.

Cornelius Eady

#15. When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Marilyn Hacker

#16. No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

Ellen Glasgow

#17. What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.

Susan Sontag

#18. To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

#19. It (the dash ) is a comfortable punctuation mark since even the most rigorous critic can seldom claim that any particular example of it is a misuse. Its overuse is its greatest danger, and the writer who can't resist dashes may be suspected of uncoordinated thinking.

Bergen Evans

#20. The day when on the cover of my books, my name will appear in bigger fond than the title of my book- I will stop writing because that would be the death of the writer in me.

Kirtida Gautam

#21. I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.

Lorin Stein

#22. Gorky called for the building of a monument to the young martyr, who, the writer said, had 'understood that a relative by blood may also be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared'.69

Orlando Figes

#23. The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.

Steve Martin

#24. The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.

Lisa Unger

#25. Exactly as we might ask God, and do ask God, to change our fate. The difference is that in the story the writer actually replies and in the end even changes his mind.

Daniel Kehlmann

#26. (Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

Howard Kerr

#27. The only person stopping you from doing something is yourself, and looking for excuses all the time just gets in the way of obtaining your own goals. It's like the writer who keeps getting up and straightening the pictures in the room.

Chrissie Hynde

#28. (1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next.

Roger Ebert

#29. The writer has the advantage of a medium that can be contemplated many times over on the pages of a book or a magazine. The words lie on the page and the writer has an extended opportunity to imprint on his reader every meaning and nuance distilled from experience.

Bienvenido Lumbera

#30. The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed.

Sherwood Anderson

#31. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

Tobias Wolff

#32. Writers of nonfiction have the right - perhaps even the responsibility - to access the wonders of the writer's craft to make their work interesting and enjoyable.

Sol Stein

#33. I like surprises. I like mystery. I'm not the kind of person who goes to the writer's room and goes, I need to know the whole story so I can prepare. No, don't tell me anything!

Josh Holloway

#34. What has always been at the heart of film making was the value of a script. It was really the writer who could make or break a film. But as we all know, the writer has always been at the bottom of the creative heap.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

#35. Hardison held up a gigantic bag that Parker could have used as a dress. "I picked up all sorts of things," he said with a smile. "I grabbed the entire run of Chew, and I savaged the first trade paperback for the Magic: The Gathering comic, signed by the writer, no less.

Matt Forbeck

#36. I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

John Banville

#37. They say that theater is the actor's medium, television is the writer's medium and film is the director's medium, and it's really true.

Charlie Hunnam

#38. The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.

James Gunn

#39. Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

Walter Smith

#40. The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, "Here I am," but to write a novel, hold it up and say, "Here YOU are.

Rita Mae Brown

#41. His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

Ernest Hemingway,

#42. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

Francine Prose

#43. When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married.

Stephen King

#44. The letter we all love to receive is one that carries so much of the writer's personality that she seems to be sitting beside us, looking at us directly and talking just as she really would, could she have come on a magic carpet, instead of sending her proxy in ink-made characters on mere paper.

Emily Post

#45. A word ( ... ) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever ( ... ) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

John Fowles

#46. The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects - nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs - ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.

Maya Angelou

#47. The writer has a life and a personality but the problem of today is that most of those writers have exactly the same life; they belong to the same social class, the same milieu, they have the same experiences. Once you read one of those books, you have read them all. And this is a problem.

Pascal Bruckner

#48. Most shows, buying shows, have a standard fee for the first shot of the writer and if you have a very militant agent, I suppose he might jack it up four percent or something. But in essence, you sell for what is the going rate.

Rod Serling

#49. The combinatory agility of words," he wrote in "Not-Knowing," "the exponential generation of meaning once they're allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven't yet encountered.

Donald Barthelme

#50. As the writer of the lyric of the song 'God's Country', I am outraged by the suggestion that somehow I am connected with, believe in, or am sympathetic with Communist or totalitarian philosophy.

Yip Harburg

#51. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Flannery O'Connor

#52. I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.

Kate Christensen

#53. Multiply that scenario by one hundred or one thousand books a year. Using permission, Amazon can fundamentally reconfigure the entire book industry, disintermediating and combining every step of the chain until there are only two: the writer and Amazon.

Seth Godin

#54. I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Carlos Fuentes

#55. I'm not the writer who says, "You have to say it exactly as I wrote it," because you don't get good work. You want somebody who's going to bring something interesting to it and really create a character with you. You see that with certain actors.

Scott Frank

#56. John Milton almost single-handedly created the identity of the writer as political activist.

Anna Beer

#57. The writer asks himself, 'Can I think of a plot that will parallel this? Can I take this work of literature as an example of something I might produce?' Let us, then, consider literature as a productive science.

J.V. Cunningham

#58. Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.

Alexander McCall Smith

#59. This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.

Paulo Freire

#60. In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

Thomas Carlyle

#61. Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.

Gilbert Morris

#62. Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. The writer doubles and trebles the power of writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people.

Victor Hugo

#63. When you go into projects, you can't look at it as limited; you have to dive into it wholeheartedly to be true to the writer's vision.

Jolene Purdy

#64. As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.

Jayne Anne Phillips

#65. While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.

Terry Pratchett

#66. The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.

Kate Forsyth

#67. Guy Kay is probably my favorite and the writer I most want to emulate.

David B. Coe

#68. I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

Don DeLillo

#69. I think TV is much more the writer's medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different.

Patrick Dempsey

#70. The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer's life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.

Sol Luckman

#71. Really the writer doesn't want success ... He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

William Faulkner

#72. The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.

Anthony Trollope

#73. A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.

Anita Shreve

#74. I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.

Ben Hecht

#75. To write a novel is to dream a story and write it down on the page. That's why the power of a really good story is one of true magic. Good stories engage the reader utterly in the writer's dream so the dream becomes theirs, too.

Wendy J. Dunn

#76. Four years earlier I had been selected, with Kay Boyle, the writer, and a number of others, to go to Cambodia and come back and prove that there were no sanctuaries in that country.

William Kunstler

#77. The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

Susan Sontag

#78. Back in the shadows, in the darkest part of the garden beside the hedge, the skinny choreographer was making out with the younger member of the writer couple. I saw a hand slip inside a shirt and looked the other way.

Herman Koch

#79. Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.

John Steinbeck

#80. A story is a part of the writer's soul, told to the world.

T.A. Uner

#81. Just as the sailor yearns for port, the writer longs for the last line.

Alix Christie

#82. The similarity between the big directors I've worked with is that they allow the writer to find a way of doing what they want done without saying 'do it this way.' They describe what they want, then letting the writer figure out a way to do it.

Steven Zaillian

#83. The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

Anne McCaffrey

#84. I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair.

Scott Frank

#85. The choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator ten times over.

Margaret Atwood

#86. 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

#87. Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.

Cheryl Alleway

#88. The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

Ben Hecht

#89. The saying within the writer's room, which were my words of wisdom, if you will, was, "The punishment doesn't have to fit the crime, but there has to be a crime."

David Shore

#90. I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.

Eduardo Galeano

#91. In a writer there must always be two people - the writer and the critic.

Leo Tolstoy

#92. The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

John F. Kennedy

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. Acting is just common sense. It isn't hard if you put yourself aside and just do what the writer wrote.

James Garner

#96. There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.

Alan Taylor

#97. The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood. The artist wears combat boots.

Steven Pressfield

#98. Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust

#99. One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [ ... ] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

Anne Fadiman

#100. The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.

Lillian Hellman