Top 100 Writer Quotes
#1. I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
John Irving
#3. Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.
Don DeLillo
#4. It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Flannery O'Connor
#5. I am more of a doer than a writer. I do not live to write. I write because I have lived.
Thurman P. Banks Jr.
#7. I type everything on my computer. I carry a writer's notebook everywhere, in case I am struck by an idea. I forget things unless I write them down. I'm planning to learn how to dictate into my cellphone; I think that will be very helpful, too.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#8. There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.
Alan Taylor
#9. Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
Pamela Sargent
#10. I only get writer's block about once a day.
Sue Grafton
#11. I struggle as a writer, and I'm convinced that if I was at school now, I'd be termed as having ADS. Two minutes and I'm drifting.
Johnny Vegas
#12. The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood. The artist wears combat boots.
Steven Pressfield
#13. If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it's the difference between masturbation and making love - the real writer wants to touch another person.
Edmund White
#14. Passion is so contagious. When you're working on a project where people care, on every level, from the key grips to the main writer to the star of the show, you can't help but want to jump on board and create something.
Seth Gabel
#15. Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust
#16. My relatives used to laugh when I talked of being a writer.
Taylor Caldwell
#17. One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [ ... ] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Anne Fadiman
#18. If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
Ismail Kadare
#19. Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
#20. The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
Russell Baker
#21. I am a passionate, not an intellectual writer, which means my characters must plunge ahead of me to live the story
Ray Bradbury
#22. A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.
Quentin Tarantino
#23. The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.
Lillian Hellman
#24. I always think it's just best to just make stuff and to carry on making stuff, even if it's not off your own back, because that's the only way ... especially as a comedy writer, I make short films and then show them to live audience, so if they're laughing you know you're doing something right.
Alice Lowe
#25. People are always saying that I must have been the class clown, with all these voices. No, I was way too shy to be the class clown; I was a class clown's writer.
Tom Kenny
#26. As a writer, my job is to change your perspective, and make you think outside the box.
Mary Sage Nguyen
#27. [Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.
Paul Auster
#28. I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why ... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.
Mickey Spillane
#29. Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?
Margaret Mitchell
#31. The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
#32. We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
Lynne Truss
#33. I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.
Philip Roth
#34. Ted Sorrenson, JFK's presidential speech writer, when asked how it came about that he wrote the "ask not what you can do ... " speech, he would answer 'ask not.'
Peggy Noonan
#35. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs ... The way I write is who I am, or have become ...
Joan Didion
#36. I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.
Julianna Baggott
#37. It's rare to work on a series without a writer. If you have a question about a line, then phone calls have to be made.
Rebecca Mader
#38. Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
Hilary Mantel
#40. I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges.
Jennifer Egan
#41. No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That's why they call it rewriting.
Steven Pressfield
#42. A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.
Pico Iyer
#43. I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
Mickey Spillane
#44. As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.
James A. Michener
#45. That is a very poor career, but only a poor career give the world the light that an imperfect, but pretty good writer wants to generate
at all costs, unfotunately.
Franz Kafka
#46. The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#48. All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.
Robert Holdstock
#49. A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all.
Walter Kirn
#50. I get really excited if I think I'm going to introduce somebody to a writer they haven't found before and I think they'll love. My favorite books to get as gifts are any that the giver is messianic about.
Monica Ali
#51. I see myself much more as a writer/director or at least an aspiring writer/director - not necessarily in film.
Ricky Gervais
#52. I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.
Tess Gerritsen
#53. I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.
Garth Greenwell
#54. Writing a story requires you to understand how the world works, how characters think, how their emotions drive them to do surprising things, and so on. In other words, as a writer, you have to be more than a stylist. You need to learn to become a master of storytelling.
David Farland
#55. I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.
Ali Liebegott
#56. A true writer cuts their heart open and lets it bleed all over the page...
~Cynthia Batten
Cynthia Batten
#57. The writer's advantage, in some respects, over those whose expression lies in other fields, is in the privilege of a double - sometimes a triple - living. Pleasure multiplied in the mirrors of words, and pain siphoned off in words.
Josephine Winslow Johnson
#58. Positive reviews are energizing. Negative reviews are teaching moments and the writer must pay attention, gleaning what is helpful and ignoring the personal jabs.
Liz Cowan
#59. I'd spent most of the time Googling things "for research purposes". Spoiler alert: When you're a writer, ANYTHING can be called "research.
Chelsea M. Cameron
#60. A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
W. H. Auden
#61. Ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That's finesse.
Shandy L. Kurth
#62. But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
Donna Tartt
#64. I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave.
Ruth Rendell
#65. I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.
Romesh Gunesekera
#66. It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.
Jean Stafford
#67. People would ask if I wanted to host things and I was like, "No, I'm a writer, I don't host things." Just thinking I wouldn't be good at it - which is true - but also just wanting to hold on to some part of my identity.
Joel Stein
#69. Is the writer a prophet or priest - does he show the truth or serve the truth? ...
John Geddes
#70. My parents are both really, really funny, and my little sister is a really good painter, and my other sister is a really good writer.
Michael Cera
#71. When I make my own videos, I am the writer, the editor, the lighting person, everything - that's why my videos are blurry.
Lilly Singh
#73. If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.
Quentin Tarantino
#74. About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
Josh Billings
#75. I'm clearly not a writer, but I'm always a fan of them.
Michael Pena
#76. What was Dr. Mera's motive for murder? I don't need to tell that to a writer of detective novels such as yourself. You know well enough yourself that even without a motive, a murderer lives to kill.
Rampo Edogawa
#77. When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really.
Noah Hawley
#78. And in our dark days, with so many threatening clouds on the horizon, he concluded, we puff up a story like this to drug people, to distract their
attention from the serious problems and
divert them with a Romeo-and-Juliet
story, one scripted, however, by a soap opera writer.
Andrea Camilleri
#79. Marketing is not what lures a writer to this pursuit. Marketing is the adversary that arrives smuggled inside the Trojan Horse of one's creative impulse.
Jane Friedman
#80. I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.
Tom Bissell
#81. My work is known by too few people for me to be remembered as a writer - that is, beyond those dedicated souls (bless them) who have followed the oeuvre through its various stages. To be realistic, when they and the last of my friends have died, I doubt I shall be remembered at all.
John Scott
#82. It's not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing.
John Boyne
#83. I think I always knew I would be a writer some day, but it wasn't until I was grown and had children of my own that I turned to telling Native American stories.
Joseph Bruchac
#84. I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.
Dorothy Parker
#85. One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot, and tinker with it according to my taste.
Crescent Dragonwagon
#86. I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
Neil Gaiman
#87. I've always thought of myself as an organic writer, rather than a cerebral one. I feel my way along as I go, hoping I'll get to the place I intend to reach.
Len Wein
#88. What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.
John C. McGinley
#89. There's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure.
Victoria Glendinning
#90. I wanted to be a film and television writer and producer.
Tyra Banks
#92. I'm a writer. If I'm staring at you, I'm not being rude. I'm trying to decide if you need to go in a book.
If you're a snot, I may be trying to decide how to kill you.
Anonymous
#93. You - and I'll venture every third writer in Europe nowadays - fancies himself a poet, when all you're doing is building little towers of words set prettily on a page.
Therese Anne Fowler
#94. At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas.
Ian Rankin
#95. My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
Daniel Goldstein
#96. I have been, earlier in my life, a lazy writer. I'd spend three hours at the gym to avoid writing, or I'd just find other distractions - reading, doing laundry, talking on the phone, etc. But suddenly I was like a laser beam: I was relentlessly focused, sometimes to the detriment of other things.
Emily Susan Rapp
#97. Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.
Peter Bichsel
#98. I've come to the possible conclusion that being a comedic writer/director is like running track. You do it for a certain amount of time and then you have to stop. Or you at least have to accept that you're not going to be at the top of your game. And that's OK.
David Wain
#99. To be a writer is to constantly evolve and keep ones imagination expanding and that's what make a great author and artist.
Adona M. Pierre
#100. Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
Ali Smith
