Top 100 Write Books Quotes
#1. I used to think, 'I'm going to write.' I knew that from quite early on, but I also thought, 'Maybe I'll be an explorer or a spy,' and it all came from books.
Lisa Tuttle
#2. Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.
Meg Cabot
#3. He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.
Katherine Paterson
#4. The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.
Shandy L. Kurth
#5. Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.
Hemant Mehta
#6. I had the offer to write books plenty of times during the early stage of my career, and I always kind of just pushed back because it wasn't the right time.
Tim Howard
#7. I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
Ernest Hemingway,
#8. Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.
Jesse Jackson
#9. People do amazing things for love. Books are full of wonderful stories about this kind of stuff, and stories aren't just fantasies, you know. They're so much a part of the people who write them that they practically teach their readers invaluable lessons about life.
Mahbod Seraji
#10. I write to get ideas out of my head
Bobbi Kay
#11. It's - I write the books and let the market find who reads it. I guess a young adult is anywhere from ten to fifteen.
Louis Sachar
#12. 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
#13. Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.
Rick Yancey
#14. I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
#15. I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books.
Michael Connelly
#16. I just try to write entertaining books that are easily identifiable.
J.A. Konrath
#17. I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
Reid Hoffman
#18. I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path.
Sue Grafton
#19. My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
Terry Pratchett
#20. To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth.
James Slater
#21. We watch films in class," she told Obinze. "They talk about films here as if films are as important as books. So we watch films and then we write a response paper and almost everybody gets an A. Can you imagine? These Americans are not serious
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#22. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#23. 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
#24. Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
Dejan Stojanovic
#25. Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.
Ken Follett
#26. I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.
Kevin Brockmeier
#27. I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.
Joy Fielding
#28. I write my books in my head, and not in a specific study with a view. The view is from my inner eyes.
Wilbur Smith
#31. I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#32. Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey.
Sharon Kay Penman
#33. I think books find their way to you when you need them. Whenever I feel like I'm not going to live to read all the books I want to read, I remind myself that the important ones find their way to me (Rosanne Cash (Musician/Write)
Rosanne Cash
#34. Books are savaged and careers destroyed by surly snots who write anonymous reviews and publishers can't be bothered to protest this institutionalized corruption.
Warren Murphy
#35. The biggest influence on my books was the fact that I had worked in a newspaper for so long. In a daily paper, you learn to write very quickly; there is no time to sit and brood about what you are going to say.
Maeve Binchy
#36. I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.
Jim Crace
#37. I actually think there are more Republicans than people realize who would be sympathetic to immigration reform in the rank and file. I think the lesson for Jeb Bush is politicians shouldn't write books with long lead times.
E. J. Dionne
#39. All of my friends want to be in my books, but no one wants to die ... ummm ... I write westerns ... everyone dies.
Barry Andrew Chambers
#40. If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly.
Carl Jung
#41. I never thought I'd be a writer. I never thought I'd be able to read a book, let alone write one. So if books like this inspire kids to write, or even read a whole book, I think it's good.
Don Novello
#42. He felt a deep urge to put some order in this chaos. Leaning against a large standing-stone by the wayside, he drew out his dreambook and began to write.
Alan McCluskey
#43. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
Gore Vidal
#45. People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say.'
Jennifer Weiner
#46. My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Tao Lin
#47. But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.
Edward Abbey
#48. Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.
Nicholas Sparks
#49. I always loved animals. And when I was ten, I decided I had to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them.
Jane Goodall
#50. In the odd moment when I am not thinking about horses, I write books.
Meg Rosoff
#51. Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit. Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications
Linda F. Radke
#52. There are enough women to do the childbearing and the childrearing. I know of none who can write my books.
Henry Handel Richardson
#53. Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz
Welwyn Wilton Katz
#54. I'm from Ohio, and I wasn't one of those kids who grew up making movies or whatever, but I always wanted to write. I was probably in high school when I realized the things I was writing weren't books; they were movies, they were visual.
David Leslie Johnson
#55. I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.
Steven Pinker
#56. I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
Carol Ann Duffy
#57. I wanted to be a writer that had an impact. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.
James Frey
#58. A nice thing about children's books, though I'm probably alone in this opinion among other people who write and publish them, is that they did get to be in this unrecognized ghetto for a long time.
Daniel Handler
#59. Readers read more into books than writers write into them.
Melvyn Small
#60. Most books are surplus to the world's requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren't just using up trees.
Michel Faber
#61. I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.
John Grisham
#62. An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.
Matthew Gregory Lewis
#63. I write in the morning - and then I'm always experimenting and tasting recipes for the books.
Diane Mott Davidson
#64. One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
Marina Tsvetaeva
#65. I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.
R.A. Salvatore
#66. This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.
Rachel Joyce
#67. I didn't write with a target audience in mind. What excited me was how much I would enjoy writing about Harry. I never thought about writing for children - children's books chose me. I think if it is a good book anyone will read it.
J.K. Rowling
#68. I've heard that some authors do dream their books and I would love that if it happened to me, but so far it hasn't. Sometimes I'll get a good idea during the night and if I don't write it down, I won't remember it the next morning.
Judy Blume
#69. I surround myself with books when I write, thus surrounding myself with writers... only they don't critique me and then get up for coffee.
Ryan Lilly
#70. Producing words isn't a problem for me. And I usually write two books at a time. When one horse gets winded, you jump on the other.
Don Winslow
#71. The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.
Jo Nesbo
#72. Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.
Bernard-Henri Levy
#73. Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends.
Louis MacNeice
#74. Normally, I just sit in my quiet little room and do the small things that bring me pleasures. I read my books, I answer email, I write a little bit.
Aaron Swartz
#75. Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.
Daniel Handler
#76. It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.
Jean Webster
#77. When I made the leap from category romance to larger single-title books, I was encouraged to make the book 'big,' and suspense was allowed. Over the years, I've been able to write the kind of books I love, with a balance of suspense and romance. How lucky am I?
Lisa Jackson
#78. For a perfect holiday I need my iPhone and my writing tools. I write all my books by hand so black felt pens and yellow legal pads are a must. And my eyebrow pencil. I'm very low-maintenance.
Jackie Collins
#80. I write what I want to write. Period. I don't write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don't write suspense novels or thrillers. I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I'll just keep writing them until they do sell
and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime.
Bentley Little
#81. My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.
Patricia MacLachlan
#82. I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
Oscar Wilde
#83. To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?
Emile M. Cioran
#84. We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#85. I've written a lot of books in my time, and to write a book about Joe McCarthy and have some of the major media paying attention, I'm not used to that.
M. Stanton Evans
#86. I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
John Updike
#87. The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
Richard Flanagan
#88. I travel whenever I can - every couple of years if it is possible. I always say I'm not to write books on the countries I visit, but somehow I always seem to use material I can found in these countries in my books.
Ursula Torday
#89. I don't think the process of writing books is in any way sensible. It's not logical, and it's not reasonable. I do write very fast, and I just do it in a binge. Other people binge-drink; I binge-write.
Kerry Greenwood
#90. I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"
Carl Reiner
#91. Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.
John Grisham
#92. She read books of poetry, though they had lately begun to stoke her fury. It was all very well for these poets, who wandered off to have adventures and then could string them to words, to music. Anything she might write would be formless, a creature of rage and stormcloud. No music there.
Ilana C. Myer
#93. I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
Joseph O'Neill
#94. I write four books a year. I'm very fortunate that I write quickly; around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this.
Alexander McCall Smith
#95. Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how amazing the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it.
Josh Lieb
#96. You don't go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it's easier to write it from scratch.
Bill Gates
#97. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. *1937
Samuel Beckett
#98. Whatever picture you paint
or poem you write
He is beyond that.
Whatever height you can reach,
He is higher than your 'highest'.
Get rid of your talking and your books -
it is far better
to let Him be your book.
Jalaluddin Rumi
#99. Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.
Meg Cabot
#100. I couldn't suppress a smile. It was inconceivable that I was here, in a place as extraordinary as the fantasy books Sophie loved. Maybe...just maybe those stories are based on a measure of truth. Maybe one day I'd write our story.
Heather L. L. FitzGerald
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