Top 100 Writer Of Quotes
#1. The author apologizes for being unable to afford a ghost writer, which explains the lack of a distinctive prose style.
Richard Armour
#2. A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.
Flannery O'Connor
#3. No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.
Alfred De Vigny
#4. To do justice to a lifelong dream of being a writer, I must give it the intense concentration and focus I gave to track. To do both with excellence is not possible. It is with a sense of sadness and joyous anticipation that I leave track and move on.
Florence Griffith Joyner
#5. A bench in the street can be a good writer because all kind of material comes onto it like a heavy rain!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#6. No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.
Rebecca Solnit
#7. A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.
Ronald Frame
#8. 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
#9. We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.
Anais Nin
#10. And what is life without the company of wine, women and good weather.
Avijeet Das
#11. The challenge of the writer is to transform - artistically and imaginatively - a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.
Hillel F. Damron
#12. Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.
Norman Mailer
#13. When I write fiction, I struggle to decide the fate of two people created by my mind and spend countless hours to give them a happy ending. God, the Almighty has created infinite human beings till date and runs all our lives with such ease. He is the BEST WRITER of all.
Shahla Khan
#14. When you're reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call "taking up with a writer," something happens.
Al Pacino
#16. I'm not only a writer, but have directed and produced, know the difficulties of the line producer, can deal with the studio, can talk with the director and get his or her vision and help exact that. I think it just gives you more tools.
John Lee Hancock
#17. I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.
Jonathan Lethem
#18. 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
#19. I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.
Jim Sturgess
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I've ever met: Every writer I've ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down.
Fran Lebowitz
#24. The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
Anton Chekhov
#25. I learned that you have to respect how much time and work a writer has put into their book. I always give the writer I'm publishing a good deal of control in shaping the book and figuring out how it looks, but I'll make suggestions on how to make it stronger.
Kevin Sampsell
#26. I understood Truman Capote's brilliant assessment of the writer's dilemma: When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.
Betsy Lerner
#27. I had discovered that being a writer gave you a lot of license to fiddle with the truth, but I'd better not get into the habit of it.
Robert McCammon
#28. 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
#29. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
Joyce Carol Oates
#30. Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
#31. 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
#32. Everything is an echo of something I once read.
Dream, hope, and celebrate life!
Love always comes back in a song.
One thing we all have in common is a love for food and drink.
Memories never die, and dreams never end!
What is time?
John Siwicki
#33. Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.
Steve Erickson
#34. As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me,
Theresa Rebeck
#35. Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.
Her response was, If it's only a symbol, to hell with it.
Flannery O'Connor
#36. Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.
Victor LaValle
#37. The job of a fiction writer is to engage the reader and rip them from reality.
Tom M. Wiseman
#38. You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.
Jake Kasdan
#39. 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
#40. I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.
Fred D'Aguiar
#41. Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.
Meagan Spooner
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
#46. I loved Cookie [Mueller]. She was a much better writer than actress. She shouldn't have stuck with me in the beginning; she should have immediately become a writer. She would have had more of a chance.
John Waters
#47. 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
#48. A writer's main tool is his memory - his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.
Anatoly Rybakov
#49. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
William Zinsser
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. I've never suffered from writer's block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I've always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I'll stop and look for another career.
J.G. Ballard
#55. 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
#56. No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category.
Herman Koch
#57. One of the difficulties of being a writer must be that you create drama that you can't live out. That's one of the wonderful things about acting.
Anjelica Huston
#58. As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.
John D'Agata
#59. How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.
Kate Zambreno
#60. Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
#61. We should be working to live, not living to work. We have created this "individualistic culture" were living to work has been centered around material gains. Working to live is a better approach because it emphasis on the human experiences and the condition of living.
Henry Johnson Jr
#62. I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.
Louis Sachar
#63. Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.
Holly Black
#64. The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
Flannery O'Connor
#65. As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.
Nicola Monaghan
#66. 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
#67. The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.
Scott Turow
#68. The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
Paul Theroux
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.
Clifford Geertz
#72. Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the whole world, and an entire sprawling industry, that writing monsters and demons and end-of-the-world is not hack-work, it can challenge the best. Joss Whedon raised the bar for every writer - not just genre/niche writers, but every single one of us.
Russell T. Davies
#73. I wanted to be understood. As a human-being, and as a writer. That meant getting to (truly) know myself- away from the opinions, beliefs, assumptions, criticism, and judgement of others. It meant re-learning language... to speak concisely. It meant learning the language of my heart and soul.
Cheri Bauer
#74. I considered my home sanctuary from the judicial arena, far from the Fernoza Family legacy, and I had no intention of sharing it with anyone.
A.E.H. Veenman
#75. If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?
Lauren B. Davis
#76. It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.
Charles Dickens
#77. My father, a Russian translator, wanted to distinguish me by calling me Misha, the Russian diminutive of his name, Michael. My name and work as a writer specialising in the Balkans has created a myth that I have Slavic connections, but actually I am British.
Misha Glenny
#78. One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.
Justin Cronin
#79. Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.
David Walliams
#80. I was trained to look at colour, edges, to see negative space. I honestly think my greatest influence as a writer is from Cubism - the idea of a multi-faceted, multi-perspective way of looking at things.
Rebecca Miller
#81. Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories.
Cullen Bunn
#82. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
#83. REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
Ambrose Bierce
#84. 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
#85. If you think of something, do it.
Plenty of people often think, I'd like to do this, or that.
Lydia Davis
#86. The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
#87. For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.
Sara Sheridan
#88. As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
#89. As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?
Criss Jami
#90. Certainly, I read a lot and follow the news. But as a writer, I am not interested in a political story. I am searching for the humanity of the characters. I never set out to write a book about an 'issue.'
Cristina Henriquez
#91. I hear that 5 o'clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I'm also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.
Diablo Cody
#92. In my own life as a reader I experience real moments of alienation when a writer feels too perfect, or like even the flaws they are admitting are somehow noble, or dysfunctional in an overly edgy, aesthetically pleasing way.
Leslie Jamison
#93. I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. ("Advance Notice")
Richard Matheson
#94. Eroticism bubbles beneath the surface of every vampire story, but Anne Rice is a writer to make the pot boil.
Janet Maslin
#95. I think of myself more as a filmmaker or as a film person than as strictly just a writer. I don't come out of playwriting or anything like that.
Peter Gould
#96. I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man's name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him "Two P.M.," like that other writer who called his black man "Friday.
Kamel Daoud
#97. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
#98. I am not a trained writer and I don't think anyone would accuse me of being a funny person. But I feel God has truly blessed me.
Vantile Whitfield
#99. A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Graham Greene
#100. I know of three ways to recognize another writer: Writers are shamelessly nosy. Writers tell good stories, even about dumb old, daily things. On most writers, the earmarks of thrift, if not outright povery, are evident.
Joyce Thompson
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