Why A Writer Quotes

#1. perhaps it is clear why a writer should be interested in the constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war.

Ernest Hemingway,

#2. Why a writer writes? This question is trivial! The important question is this: What he writes?

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#3. There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.

Margaret Mahy

#4. Why a writer? I should have been a surgeon or a mechanic, for surely a scalpel or wrench couldn't cause me the anguish words do.

J. Carter Swift

#5. Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer.

Haruki Murakami

#6. I can't imagine why you would want to take your child to see what the career of a writer is like, because it mostly consists of sitting in a room typing, or going to the library and looking something up. Those are not exciting things to watch.

Daniel Handler

#7. Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough.

Hugh MacLeod

#8. A writer worth his salt is not going to write about how damned lovely it is; it isn't, that's why so many people tell themselves it is [lovely].

John A. Williams

#9. Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.

Muse

#10. Writing has made me a better actor. Acting has made me a better writer. So why wouldn't directing make me a better actor and writer?

Jonah Hill

#11. As a writer I have received my share of mixed reviews. Even so, as I read through stacks of vituperative letters, I got a strong sense for why the world does not automatically associate the word "grace" with evangelical Christians. Noxious

Philip Yancey

#12. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

Nick Flynn

#13. It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.

Jeanette Winterson

#14. If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read 'The Midnight Disease' by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain. I know what's wrong with me!

Dorothea Benton Frank

#15. Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.

Fabrizio De Andre

#16. Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.

M.V. Carey

#17. I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.

Anne Lamott

#18. I'm a horrible typist. That's why I became a writer.

Glenn Hefley

#19. You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.

Francine Prose

#20. Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'

Gore Vidal

#21. Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why the writer hasn't written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.

Robert Benchley

#22. That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#23. When a scientist's son or daughter becomes a scientist they'll say "Wonderful! Wonderful!" So, why, in the name of God, would a mother be jealous to see her daughter become a successful writer?

Mary Higgins Clark

#24. Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.

Eugene Ionesco

#25. Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer.

Chloe Thurlow

#26. Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#27. When a young writer deliberately tries to create an effect, the result is often a little self-conscious and overdone. But why is it so hard for us to glory in what the writer has tried to do, or even in the very fact that the writer has deliberately tried to do something?

Lucy Calkins

#28. I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one.

Paulo Coelho

#29. Mike Ruby, a writer in the magazine's Business section, used to call Newsweek writing f - k-style journalism: Flash (the lead), Understanding (the billboard - why is this story important), Clarification (tell the details of the story), and Kicker (bringing it all together with a clever ending).

Lynn Povich

#30. On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

Sara Sheridan

#31. I never think about anything in my brain. I think in very small repetitive circles inside my own brain. That's why I'm a writer. It's the only way I get any sort of conclusion or understanding about anything.

Melissa Febos

#32. And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

Paul Auster

#33. There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

Tobias Wolff

#34. What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

Emile M. Cioran

#35. Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

Fran Lebowitz

#36. To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.

Colin Mochrie

#37. I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

E.L. Doctorow

#38. Each time we had a visiting writer, I asked what she thought of women and humor. By the end of the year, I had perfected my question and asked Adrienne Rich why there was so little written about women and humor. She looked at me right in the eye and said, 'You write it.' I took that as an order.

Kate Clinton

#39. Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

James D. Houston

#40. I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.

Sylvia Plath

#41. To be a great actor you just need to comprehend, so that's why I became a writer.

Johnathon Schaech

#42. Smart authors, faced with storms, chose to create umbrellas. That's why a diverse group of authors banded together to create The Fiction Writer's Co-op, which will work to find innovative ways to promote each other's work and cheer each other on in a very competitive field.

M.J. Rose

#43. You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

Arthur Ransome

#44. A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#45. In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all." ( ... ) Crabbin said, "He was just a popular entertainer."
"Why the hell not?" Martins said fiercely.
"Oh well, I merely meant ... "
"What was Shakespeare?

Graham Greene

#46. Why had I become a writer in the first place? Because I wasn't fit for society; I didn't fit into the system.

Brian Aldiss

#47. I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

Colleen McCullough

#48. I've always been admired as a musician and painter but not spiritual writer, and that's why God's an artist, not priest.

Robin Sacredfire

#49. You are a story worthy of being told,
A person made to be loved,
With a life meant to be lived.

Nadia Hasan

#50. With a musical, you kind of have to do a mind-meld with the book-writer, the lyricist, the composer, the director - sometimes the producer. I think that's a reason why musicals are the hardest form.

David Henry Hwang

#51. When I think about why I would be a writer, why I should continue to be a writer, it seems to me one of the few things you can dowhere you're never bored.

Gish Jen

#52. Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.

Paul Theroux

#53. I've always been able to say what I meant! It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone, so why can't I saw what it feels like?

Stephen King

#54. I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.

Khaled Hosseini

#55. The importance not just of history, but of roots - that a writer must have then to nurture, to remember if he is to endure.

F. Sionil Jose

#56. Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That's like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.

Amy Tan

#57. That's why I love being a writer. My imagination can take me places I may never see except in my mind's eye.

Pearl Cleage

#58. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every last person out there isn't dating a writer.

Rachel Bloom

#59. I never said you were supposed to be a jailer, i only said a normal person would have questioned why someone would create a decoy nun and then crawl out the window.

Janette Rallison

#60. Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.

S.E. Hinton

#61. I'm not a writer, but today I think you have to be everything. As an artist you have an obligation to let people know what is on your mind and why you're doing this.

Ai Weiwei

#62. Why did I become a writer? Because I grew up in New York City, and there were seven newspapers in New York City, and my family was an inveterate reader of newspapers and I loved holding a paper in my hand. It was something sacred.

H. G. Bissinger

#63. He finished his drink. 'I don't like mornings either,' he said. That's why I'm a writer.

Dorothy B. Hughes

#64. I think I'm a writer, and it's my job. People in other professions are expected to do their jobs all the time. Why shouldn't I?

Richard Greenberg

#65. Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again.

Rene Char

#66. I may be a famous writer but when white people clinch to their wallet and stare at me with scorn I need to ask my skin why.

Daniel Marques

#67. 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

#68. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it

Roald Dahl

#69. As a writer of criticism, the consumer thing is the least interesting thing, but as a critic, the single worst thing you can do is send a reader to waste time and money on something - even if it's something you personally love. You have to indicate the reasons why you love it and they'll hate it.

Jonathan Gold

#70. One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

Quentin Tarantino

#71. Art has a noble task: to educate man. That's why the writer's part in our society is a most responsible one. The writers are the architects of human souls and the critics are the architects of the writer's souls.

Slawomir Mrozek

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.

Robert Kurson

#75. 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

#76. It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

Tobias Wolff

#77. Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.

William Zinsser

#78. Reading and analyzing what you are reading, why you like this or don't like that, can only make you a better writer. So reading is a must! Just like art students study the masters, we too should study and learn from those we adore and/or aspire to be like.

Darynda Jones

#79. There is a reason why I am a writer ... sometimes it is the only way you can get people to listen to you!

Phil Wohl

#80. I know why you picked her," Frank says, still sitting on the grass. "She's like you, sort of. A writer. Unhappy. Wishing she had someone who understood her. That's what killed her- being lonely.

Albert Borris

#81. Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?

Orson Welles

#82. I feel a passion for what we're trying to do.I mean, why does somebody who's old who's a writer keep writing? Because that's who they are.

Charles Koch

#83. For me, the day job comes first. That's why I call myself a diplomat who writes, not a writer who masquerades as a diplomat. If the day job demands it, I won't write at all. I write in what I call 'the crevices of my day job', and that comes only on weekends.

Vikas Swarup

#84. Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.

Patricia Briggs

#85. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

E.L. Doctorow

#86. I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office; that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people; I do not lead the people.

Nikki Giovanni

#87. It is an awesome tragedy in this life that, when asking what a person is and they reply doctor or lawyer or engineer, we don't say Well thats a nice little hobby, but why don't you take up writing or painting or music?

D.A. Botta

#88. Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved.

Alan Dean Foster

#89. I once dreamt of being a writer, to have my words known by many from many countries; this dream i dreamt came true ... so why cant your dream come true too? Rayvon L Browne does not believe in the word cant - Rayvon L Browne

Rayvon L. Browne

#90. You see the genius that Whitney Houston has as an interpreter of material, and you realize why genius can be applied to only a few interpretive performers. She finds meaning and depth and soulfulness in a song that often the writer and composer never really knew was there.

Clive Davis

#91. If you don't believe in yourself, and you don't have the fortitude to make that dream happen, why should the hotshots in the publishing world take a chance on you? I don't believe that you need an MFA to be a writer, but I do think you need to take some good workshops.

Jodi Picoult

#92. You know, that's kind of the thing, I can't freestyle and I used to always wonder why I couldn't, and when I would try once out of every six months, but I was always a great writer!

Bubba Sparxxx

#93. There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#94. Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?

Darin Strauss

#95. I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.

Jim Harrison

#96. We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#97. 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

#98. Most writers are lazy intellectuals, and it's a goddamn shame because a writer with an audience has a moral responsibility to make readers think about the world in a different way than what they're used to. Why else would you pick up a book if not to inhabit another realm of existence for a while?

Kevin Keck

#99. What's your job?" He looked blank. "I've forgotten ... "
"I'm a writer. A novelist."
"Maybe that explains why you were going to hell," Raziel said in a wry voice.

Kristina Douglas

#100. There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

Penny Jordan