Top 100 Who Is A Writer Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I don't know anyone who is a writer who isn't influenced by the relationships in their life.
Amos Lee
#3. For everyone I know who is a writer, there was some awkward time in their lives when they had to learn to call themselves one.
James Bernard Frost
#4. The public has no idea that writing is a disease, and that the writer who publishes is like a beggar who exhibits his sores.
Michael Kruger
#5. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
Gerald Brenan
#6. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#7. I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#8. You have to search for the best writer - I'm not saying I'm the one, but it's a bad idea to just find the person who is a copycat of Stieg Larsson.
David Lagercrantz
#9. Absolutely breathtaking, nail-biting, and edge-of-your-seat. Michael Koryta is a master at maintaining suspense and a hell of a good writer. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is one of the best chase-and-escape novels you'll read this year-or any other year. The pace never lets up.
Nelson DeMille
#10. The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do ... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.
Donald Barthelme
#11. A humorist is a writer who's not funny enough to call themselves a comedian.
Dan Alatorre
#12. For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.
Simon Beaufoy
#13. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
Honore De Balzac
#14. How do I tell people who I am? Not being a writer, the only way is to sing songs that reflect my opinions.
Cass Elliot
#15. 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
#16. Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!
Rashers Tierney
#17. They want to know
who I write these poems for.
Tell them it's for all lovers
because I don't see a difference
between our love
and their love.
Kamand Kojouri
#18. A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
#19. 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
#20. Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
Brian A. McBride
#21. It's not often you find someone who is a good friend and good writer, Charlotte was both.
E.
#22. As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.
Dinaw Mengestu
#23. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.
Rachel Carson
#24. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident ... Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
#25. The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.
John Dos Passos
#26. A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.
John Hodgman
#27. Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.
Peter Matthiessen
#28. The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.
Maurice Blanchot
#29. The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
George Saunders
#30. There is Harlan Ellison the human being, who takes a crap a couple of times a day, and who farts, and who eats chicken croquettes, if I can find them. And then there is the writer, this writer-person, who is a much finer person than I. Much more orderly, much more meaningful. Worthier, than I [am].
Harlan Ellison
#31. A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.
Criss Jami
#32. There is only one person who needs to be convinced that you're a writer. That would be you.
Tim Campbell
#33. Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time.
Barry Levinson
#34. A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.
Richard LaGravenese
#35. It's as much a writer's concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.
Ilya Ehrenburg
#36. For Christians who desire to write, the call to read broadly is an absolute necessity, for writing is, in many ways, the process of digesting and synthesizing not only the thoughts and experiences of a writer's own life, but the writer's intellectual wanderings as well.
Gene C. Fant Jr.
#37. Any writer who waits for inspiration to strike will never finish a book. Inspiration is all very well but it will never replace sheer dogged determination.
Barbara Michaels
#38. If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.
Matthew Arnold
#39. Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#40. The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things.
George R R Martin
#41. When I began writing, the words that inspired me were these: A writer is someone who has written today. If you want to be a writer, whats stopping you?
J. A. Jance
#42. A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.
Roger Scruton
#43. 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
#44. But Love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom.
Sheldon Vanauken
#45. But I loved his books, or at least that first one. And I felt that somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must still be there. That you couldn't write such beautiful things and have such an ugly heart. But that is the truth. He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.
Gabrielle Zevin
#46. Acquiring an aggressive, honest, and communicative agent with actual relationships in real-live New York publishing houses is, in my opinion, the single most important move that a writer who aspires to be successful can make.
John Lescroart
#47. Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.
Peter S. Beagle
#48. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.
Mary Norris
#49. 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
#50. I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.
Ishmael Reed
#51. For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.
Nancy Kress
#52. A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.
Richard Wright
#53. The faults of a brilliant writer are never dangerous on the long run; a thousand people read his work who would read no other; inquiry is directed to each of his doctrines; it is soon discovered what is sound and what is false; the sound become maxims, and the false beacons.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#54. I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.
Graham Swift
#55. An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#56. Variety is definitely the spice of life but I love writing office romances (I was a secretary before I became a writer), because it's every girl's dream to meet that gorgeous hunky boss who sweeps her off her feet and takes her out of her dull routine.
Helen Brooks
#57. To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Robertson Davies
#58. As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.
David Frum
#59. You can make anything into a play for the simple reason that the human mind is one of the best writers in the business. So, if you've got a writer who's clever enough to give you enough clues, you will fill out every blank spot in a play, every single one.
Morgan Freeman
#60. As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
William Gibson
#61. Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.
S.E. Hinton
#62. A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
E.B. White
#63. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#64. Occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed."
Daniel Handler
#65. A writer who intermingles his own opinions with that of his characters is less consequent than a fascistic communist.
Kevin Focke
#66. As a writer and director, I want to know what is behind the good manners and soft voice. Who is inside the silhouette?
Federico Fellini
#67. I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
John Green
#68. To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds.
Dilys Laing
#69. There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That's a savage person who looks at everything as a story and, you know, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite.
Walter Kirn
#70. I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'
Sue Monk Kidd
#71. If a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground.
George Saunders
#72. he was obliged to confess that the true essence of a writer's work is usually unknown to him. He recalled the case of Swift, who, when he wrote Gulliver's Travels, tried to bring an indictment against all humanity but actually left a book for children.
Anonymous
#73. I mean, I'm a writer, actor, AND director. Not to rock the boat or anything, but compare that to a carpenter and, in the end, who is the better man?
Zach Braff
#74. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview]
Ray Bradbury
#75. People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.
Karen Traviss
#76. As a director/writer/producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is.
J.J. Abrams
#77. For anyone who is: just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it'll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.
Robin McKinley
#78. A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.
Jim Bishop
#79. A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory ... dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.
Rumer Godden
#80. A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#81. It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a
tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?
Richard Ford
#82. Anyone who claims that truth is stranger than fiction has never gazed into a writer's mind, or read my stories.
Lucian Barnes
#83. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension
Anais Nin
#84. The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?"
"To be a writer, you need readers."
"I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?
Barbara Kingsolver
#85. I think the greatest reward you get as a writer is finding that people who are reasonably receptive and intelligent have liked your book.
Christopher Koch
#86. As for [Amiri] Baraka, he and I have disagreements. I mean, he becomes a demagogue when there's an audience. He's a nice guy in private. I mean I like the guy; he's a terrific writer. I've published two of his books. Baraka is one of these fundamentalists who is prone to idol worship.
Ishmael Reed
#87. How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn't mine? That I don't know? Maybe because I'm a writer who doesn't belong completely to any language.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#88. A writer is a river. Everything flows and changes and we're never the same person as the one who wrote yesterday's story.
Aleksandr Voinov
#89. It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.
Tom Bissell
#90. I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.
Robin McKinley
#91. A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.
George Jean Nathan
#92. I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.
Chuck Klosterman
#93. I think if a writer is being honest they'd admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They're like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut.
Dan Alatorre
#94. Goodness & love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils ... But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed of wisdom.
Sheldon Vanauken
#96. Mo Yan is a writer who, defiantly in the face of those who wish his work were less cartoonish and more straightforward in its political meanings, continues to sing his own peculiar and alluring song.
Dwight Garner
#97. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
E.B. White
#98. I know one writer who has been subscribing authors without their permission and sending out what she thinks are helpful advice sheets, but they come off as if she's a know-it-all. She thinks she's marketing herself and her work. All she's really doing is turning readers off.
M.J. Rose
#99. Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.
Anne Rice
#100. The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph.
Anne Lamott
