Top 79 To Be A Great Writer Quotes
#1. Listen to the Bee Gees and you can learn to be a great writer.
Kara DioGuardi
#2. I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.
Walter Cronkite
#3. In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. To be a great writer you must be fearless with your words.
Karmel Graham
#5. Everyone has access to a pen and paper, but to be a great writer is difficult.
Pamela Yates
#6. I think someday you're going to be a great writer," he said. "But" he added maliciously, "first you'll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet. You only think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first.
Henry Miller
#7. It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.
Gustave Flaubert
#8. It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that.
Guy Johnson
#9. If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.
Julianna Baggott
#10. I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.
Gene Weingarten
#11. if you want to be a great writer, you have to be a greed reader.
Imelda Akmal
#12. Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener.
Nanci Griffith
#13. Whoever wishes to rise above the common level must be prepared for a great struggle and recoil before no obstacle. A great writer is just simply a martyr whom the stake cannot kill.
Honore De Balzac
#14. Do not let the writer's authority or learning influence you, be it little or great, but let the love of pure truth attract you to read. Do not ask, 'Who said this?' but pay attention to what is said.
Thomas A Kempis
#15. A comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life every where furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.
Henry Fielding
#16. I'm an older, wall-eyed, overweight, tweedy writer who has been lucky enough to be asked to play various iterations of himself in a certain realm of popular cultutre. That gives me great joy and excitement, but I don't go to the media saying, "And I'm also the world's greatest actor."
John Hodgman
#17. Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.
John Green
#18. You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.
Peter Bowen
#19. The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Aaron Ciechanover
#20. He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
William S. Burroughs
#21. To be a great actor you just need to comprehend, so that's why I became a writer.
Johnathon Schaech
#22. It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well.
Richard Hell
#23. The real duty of a motivational speaker and an inspirational writer must be to inspire lives to live and leave distinctive footprints which shall qualify such lives to eternal eternity in the Kingdom of God notwithstanding how minute or great the footprints might be
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#24. If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones ... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#25. A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so's a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.
Louise Penny
#26. To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
Karen Thompson Walker
#27. I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?'
Dax Shepard
#28. To be a writer is to constantly evolve and keep ones imagination expanding and that's what make a great author and artist.
Adona M. Pierre
#29. I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody.
Sam Shepard
#30. IF you wish to be a writer then don't wait until you write the "great American novel" for they aren't written they are created. If you don't write at all you won't know how "great" that simple book can be.
Shiree McCarver
#31. The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.
Henry Miller
#32. Why do I feel ashamed to use words like democracy and
freedom and brotherhood? They don't have meaning any
more. I have nothing to write about any more. Remember
all that writing I did? I was going to be a great socialist
writer. I can't make sense of a word, a simple word.
Arnold Wesker
#33. Being a writer is something I love to do, plus I get independence. It's a great job for a woman because she can work at home and always be there for the children.
Anne Mather
#34. The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.
August Wilson
#35. I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.
Marisha Pessl
#36. I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better, I would love to be a writer.
Shiloh Fernandez
#37. A writer/director is a tough thing to gauge when someone hasn't directed a movie before. You just don't know. Sometimes it will be a great script that's written beautifully, and then the director who has also written it does not have the facility to translate it.
Richard Ayoade
#38. All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.
Stephanie Lennox
#39. A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff. If you don't read widely, or read only writers in fashion at the moment, you'll have a limited idea of what can be done with the English language.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#40. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru
Haruki Murakami
#41. When a crime writer thinks up a delicious twist, it is a great moment. Time to relax and take the rest of the day off. I do think that it can be overdone, however.
Mark Billingham
#42. Who wants to become a writer? And why? ... It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower of life, even if it's a cactus.
Enid Bagnold
#43. I haven't given any thought to collaborating with my sisters. It would be great fun. My daughter Molly is a wonderful writer - someday I'd love to collaborate with her.
Hallie Ephron
#45. I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.
Monica Ali
#46. My first motion capture game was with Sony - 'NBA: The Life.' It was very ahead of its time. Brandon Akiaten, he was the writer and director. He had a real vision of what this game was meant to be; it was a basketball game where I was the Jerry Maguire sports agent type guy. And it was great!
Nolan North
#47. A writer writes to a great extent to be read (let's admire those who say they don't, but not believe them).
Albert Camus
#48. I couldn't enjoy 'A Dance With Dragons,' unfortunately. Of course, I enjoyed it, but it was the first of the books I read as a writer on 'Game of Thrones,' so all I could do is think, 'We're going to have to shift that,' 'We won't be able to afford that,' or 'That's a great scene.'
Bryan Cogman
#49. I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe.
Steven Curtis Chapman
#50. My first three books, the collections, were fun to write and a great start but I have matured so much as a writer since then and am extremely proud of the Detective Byone novels- they will be my legacy!
Ricardo M. Fleshman
#51. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#52. Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru said.
Haruki Murakami
#53. Truthfully, I guess I would like to be remembered as a great writer and a kind person. I wouldn't mind if an expensive bag were named after me, like Jane Birkin.
Mindy Kaling
#54. It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.
Angela Carter
#55. Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.
Karrine Steffans
#56. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.
Barack Obama
#57. I was rather a poor student, too easily distracted - did a lot of gazing out of windows, fine for training to be a writer, but not a great way to achieve in the classroom. The truth is that I was happy to bumble along and do enough to avoid detention, but not much more.
Michael Morpurgo
#58. I was playing the game where I was going to be a great TV or film writer some day and there was nothing else that I thought about, including other people.
Dan Harmon
#59. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...
Kurt Vonnegut
#60. I'm not a writer, so I don't know what that looks like, but I can only imagine that you get all those great minds in that room, of those particular writers that created the show, and it's going to be great.
Carrie-Anne Moss
#61. The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways.
Sandra Cisneros
#62. To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
Anne Lamott
#63. At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
Walter Mosley
#64. Songwriting is something I really need to work on. I don't have very many songs but I really love it. I would love to be a great song writer some day.
Norah Jones
#65. Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.
Nell Freudenberger
#66. There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.
Michael Stipe
#67. To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
Louise Erdrich
#68. Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.
Amity Gaige
#69. I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.
Sarah Waters
#70. I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer ... if he can only ... tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes.
Clive Barnes
#71. When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.
Nick Tosches
#72. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
#73. I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and
say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.
Madeleine L'Engle
#74. Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
Jami Attenberg
#75. What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.'
Robert Creeley
#76. I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.
Harvey Pekar
#77. I used to want to be a children's writer, because I would have all these great ideas when I was little, and I'd write them and draw them, and turn them into class.
Jena Malone
#78. It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
Lev Grossman
#79. A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book ... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
Anthony Burgess
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