Top 100 To Be A Writer Quotes
#1. Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Augusten Burroughs
#2. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
Jess Walter
#3. I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.
Meghan Daum
#4. If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.
Louis L'Amour
#5. 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
#6. Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#7. When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.
Sophie Hannah
#8. I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.
Ruth Ozeki
#9. I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?
Anne Lamott
#10. When one chooses to be a writer, psychologically there's a reason for that because you like the isolation and you like to be by yourself and you are by nature timid.
Woody Allen
#11. My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.
Caitlin Flanagan
#12. When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#13. 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
#14. There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you're only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer's power and unfair to the reader.
Meghan Daum
#16. Mrs. Ball has got a daughter who is a writer. I asked her how her daughter qualified to be one. Mrs. Ball said that her daughter was dropped on her head as a child and has been "a bit queer" ever since.
Sue Townsend
#17. The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.
Carl Hiaasen
#18. There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.
Carla H. Krueger
#19. When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'
Mara Wilson
#20. I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer - I just was one.
Ann Hood
#21. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
#22. In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
W. H. Auden
#23. Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.
Chuck Palahniuk
#24. Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.
Lisa Unger
#25. A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#26. It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they're writing at all. To have one's writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.
Elizabeth Clements
#27. I can remember when
delusions of grandeur
entailed wanting to
be a rock star, movie star,
a millionaire; to make it
as a writer
now it seems that it's
to want to earn a
decent living
Phil Volatile
#28. I wanted to be a writer since I was in high school, but I never thought it was possible.
Ellen Bass
#29. I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
#30. I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.
Hannah Kent
#31. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.
Dana Brunetti
#32. London and Fog! When these two come together, it is time to be a writer!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#33. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#34. I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.
Noah Hawley
#35. My film school is making movies. But, I do think that being an actor has served me immensely, as both a writer and director, in terms of knowing what is playable and what will be fun to play, for actors, and also how to communicate to actors on set, and not screw them up and get them in their head.
Josh Radnor
#36. I find it very disturbing to be advertised, as I have noticed that it is the advertised authors that stink. I am pretty sure I am going to stink from now on, and it might just as well be in Harpers as anywhere else, I suppose. A writer is like a beanplant-he has his day and then he gets stringy.
E.B. White
#37. I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.
Neil Gaiman
#38. I knew that I always wanted to be a filmmaker, an actor, a writer and a director, that was always my plan.
Jaime King
#39. I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Nadine Gordimer
#40. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
George Orwell
#41. In my early thirties I was working in television as a researcher. I was really stuck for a period of five years. I got to TV when I was thirty. I hated being a music writer, and kept wondering why I couldn't be doing the exciting things that my friends were doing in television.
Mary Harron
#42. No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.
Storm Jameson
#43. In a movie, you have to be mindful that no budget is going to be able to deal with running around the globe at every whim of the writer.
Daniel Clowes
#44. I've always wanted to be a writer. Always been very creative. I always laughed at things that the rest of my family would sort of get angry, like not understand.
Bonnie McFarlane
#45. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
Cheryl Strayed
#46. The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211
Steven Pinker
#47. 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
#48. In high school, my goal was to be a writer for SNL, then I got into the acting.
Illeana Douglas
#49. 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
#50. A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal.
-The Carrie Diaries pg. 337
Candace Bushnell
#51. To be honest, I've never had an easy relationship with being a writer, though I persist.
Peter Gizzi
#52. The most important thing is to live an interesting life. Keep your eyes, ears and heart open. Talk to people and visit interesting places, and don't forget to ask questions. To be a writer you need to drink in the world around you so it's always there in your head.
Michael Morpurgo
#53. 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
#55. No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
Margaret Atwood
#56. I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
Toni Morrison
#57. For him, the writer should be the very devil, a disturber of dreams and wrecker of fatuous utopias, the bringer-in of reality, and rival of God in his wish to make worlds.
Hanif Kureishi
#58. 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
#59. If I could only make her fall in love with me. Pretend to be a writer and just fuck her and have her cook for me. I would never have to write I'd just pretend.
Charles Bukowski
#60. Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London.
Tracy Chevalier
#61. I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.
Deborah Eisenberg
#62. I'm Irish yet I don't drink as I refuse to be a stereotype and live down to the expectations of others.
Stewart Stafford
#63. My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It's not anything lofty, and it doesn't have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.
Anne Lamott
#64. I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.
Lev Grossman
#65. In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.
Walter Dean Myers
#66. I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.
Leon Uris
#67. It helps to know from a very early age what you want to do. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer, even though I couldn't even read. It was mainly because I thought of my father as a writer.
Tom Wolfe
#68. You give me a credit to which I have no claim in calling me "the writer of the Constitution of the United States." This was not, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands.
James Madison
#70. It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything.
Sara Sheridan
#71. Whatever you do, make sure you want to write more than you want to be a writer. Make sure you want to act more than you want to be an actor. That is what will sustain you.
Bradley Whitford
#72. One of the things I prize most about being a writer is its license - you could even say injunction - to be curious, to follow anything anywhere and see where it might take you, how it can transform you, whether in content or form.
Gregory Allen Howard
#73. I wanted to be a writer and an artist. Learning to type as quickly as I could think was a needed skill and part of my long self-directed apprenticeship.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#74. I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
Anne Fadiman
#75. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
#76. [A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
#77. I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
George Saunders
#78. I didn't really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y'know? And a world I could call my own.
Tom Waits
#79. 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
#80. I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.
Flannery O'Connor
#81. Writing is not glamorous - it's hard work. If you want to be a glamorous writer, wear purple nail varnish when you type.
Sue Cross
Sue Cross
#82. A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.
Arthur Koestler
#83. When I took off from Providence, my only professional aspiration was what it had always been: I wanted to be a sportscaster. By the time I landed in the desert, I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to be a writer.
Mike Greenberg
#84. I find myself very, very happy to be a weird writer.
Rachel
#85. I don't know when I made that active decision to be a writer or to try to write, but I know I always liked storytelling.
John Ridley
#86. Maybe I only think everyone wants to be a writer because the friends I naturally choose are people who love books. People who love books sooner or later dream of writing them. It's a natural response to stimuli.
Ellen Gilchrist
#87. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
#88. It never occurred to me to be a film director, partly because I hadn't seen a single film by a female director, but I liked the idea of being a writer moving to Hollywood and being unhappy; that sounded romantic and fabulous to me.
Mary Harron
#89. If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#90. I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.
Joan Didion
#91. If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.
Poppy Z. Brite
#92. With 'Moreau,' it's been particularly confusing because I started out being the writer of the screenplay and then trying to be the director, then being moved from being the director and having to become the dog extra, it makes some kind of sense to suddenly become a character in the story.
Richard Stanley
#93. I wanted to be a writer, so I became one. How? I wrote things down.
Ariel Gore
#94. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was probably four years old - it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.
Roxane Gay
#95. The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic
to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.
Edward Albee
#96. I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.
Paulo Coelho
#97. That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.
Adam Haslett
#98. A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spell from her pen.
Rebecca McClanahan
#99. I don't move until an actor is happy, but it was very important to me as a so-called "first time director" to keep the machine moving. It was especially important to me to keep it moving and not be some kind of precious writer-director.
William Monahan
#100. The single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author's courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer
Sol Stein
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