Top 100 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. As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.
Candice Millard
#3. The author apologizes for being unable to afford a ghost writer, which explains the lack of a distinctive prose style.
Richard Armour
#4. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.
Gore Vidal
#5. I really want my career to be as an actor-writer-director-producer, you know? I don't know what will be stronger than the other.
Danny Strong
#6. A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
Anna Quindlen
#8. As a writer, you sit around a computer all day, and it's too easy to open another tab and keep Rotten Tomatoes there.
Evan Daugherty
#9. 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
#10. Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed.
Emily Fridlund
#11. 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
#12. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.
Jane Yolen
#13. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.
Flannery O'Connor
#14. This assignment could damn well project all the words across my face and the ink stain my hands a gory mess before I finished it.
Jazz Feylynn
#15. Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.
Sara Sheridan
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,
Mark Bowden
#20. Robert Frost said, No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
Kim Addonizio
#21. Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.
James Jones
#22. People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist.
Monica Ali
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. Every story holds insight into the writer's soul. If the soul can't be found, the writer didn't bleed enough.
M.L. Stephens
#28. 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
#29. A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.
Joshua Ferris
#30. W. P. Kinsella, who was born on a farm near Edmunton, Alberta, has earned wide recognition for his wild imagination and rash humor as a writer.
Gerald Vizenor
#31. 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
#32. And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
Paul Fussell
#33. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.
Ciaran Carson
#34. Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong.
Caitlin Horrocks
#35. I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.
Avi
#36. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
Gerald Brenan
#38. Telling what must not be told is one of the writer's primary tasks. It is also a difficult and dangerous one.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#39. 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
#42. It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
Amy Tan
#43. I think my grandmother Woodrell was most responsible for my becoming a writer. She wasn't quite literate, but was very proud that she attended school as far as the third grade. She worked as a maid, housekeeper and cook.
Daniel Woodrell
#44. 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
#45. Struggling writer' e un pleonasm, cuz a writer is always struggling.
Teodor Burnar
#46. It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
Margaret Anderson
#47. There are more people involved in telling a story than the writer.
Cecelia Ahern
#48. 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
#49. I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.
M.J. Rose
#50. I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'
Edmund White
#51. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#52. Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.
Steve Martin
#53. Writer is always alone. But every author is a creator, and gods are lonely.
Lara Biyuts
#54. Writing for the love of writing. My muse makes no apologies under this pen name. ;)
Amanda Wylde
#55. Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere.
Claire Dederer
#56. A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
Andre Maurois
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. After 'Nikki' and 'Steve Harvey,' I had written on a show called 'The Oblongs,' which was pretty well respected and had a lot of 'Simpsons' writers on it. So I was a TV writer with an interesting voice at that moment.
Jill Soloway
#61. The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.
Isabel Allende
#62. MG was nearly mythical, other than my entries - no interaction with users on
the off chance one was a Fernoza on the troll. And today proved I couldn't take a stranger bearing gifts at face-value.
A.E.H. Veenman
#64. A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.
John Niven
#65. He clasped his hands to his ears as if he would tear his very brain out!" A sample line from Shadow my psychological/horror compared to Poe!
C.S. Dixon
#66. I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#67. 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
#68. When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.
David Leavitt
#69. 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
#70. The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
Will Self
#71. When a new writer comes onto a project, he'll make wholesale changes just to mark the territory or for greater credit.
Jon Spaihts
#72. One Kerry man seduced and was taking her to the ball. She felt like Cinderella it had taken her 16 and half years to get him to take her out anywhere not a mind to the school ball.
Annette J. Dunlea
#73. Learn the writer's craft, write regularly, grow to love the practice for its own sake-and inspiration will either come on a particular day or it won't, but you'll have prepared the way for it.
Dennis Palumbo
#74. Only a person with the true heart of a dictionary-writer would be lying in bed, three days after being stabbed in the gut, worrying about his P's.
Kristin Cashore
#75. I'd really want to - just from my own experience as an artist working with a writer, I'd want to do everything I could to tailor it to the artist I was working with.
David Finch
#76. 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
#77. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.
Stan D. Jensen
#78. A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.
Pierre Beaumarchais
#79. Fictional characters exist in only two places, neither of which is on the printed page. They exist, first, in the mind of the writer and, second, in the mind of the reader.
Maren Elwood
#80. I feel that a book is never written by the writer alone
it's written by him and everyone around him be it directly or indirectly
Subhasis Das
#82. I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I'm trying to give a little of it back to others. It's one of the greatest pleasures I know.
Ann M. Martin
#83. There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.
Laura Lippman
#85. Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.
Fennel Hudson
#86. Read, read . . . and then read some more. Read everything you can get your hands on! Reading to a writer is as medical school is to a doctor, as physical training is to an athlete, as breathing is to life.
Andrew Joyce
#87. 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
#88. Studios, to cut through the clutter, want recognisable titles. But that does not excuse you, as a writer, from having an original story.
Roberto Orci
#89. 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
#90. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.
Betsy Lerner
#91. If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.
Deb Caletti
#92. You usually can tell when a writer is going down hill by the size of his liquor bill.
James M. Cain
#93. I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.
Jami Attenberg
#94. White emotions when fell in love turned red...
-The Drenched Writer
Shonali Dey
#95. So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
Trevor Nunn
#96. I'm very rigid about my schedule. I sit down at 8 A.M., and the Internet blocker goes on. My standard time is 120 minutes. I'm a compulsive writer, so it reminds me to stop writing ... If I write more than that, I turn into an ogre for my kids.
Claire Cameron
#97. Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!
Samuel Colbran
#98. I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good emails.
Isabel Gillies
#99. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
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