Top 100 Writer S Quotes
#1. A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
Anna Quindlen
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
Amy Tan
#8. 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
#9. [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
#10. Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.
Steve Martin
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.
Pierre Beaumarchais
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.
Betsy Lerner
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#25. An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.
Irwin Shaw
#26. 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
#27. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.
Anthony Trollope
#28. You have to search for the best writer - I'm not saying I'm the one, but it's a bad idea to just find the person who is a copycat of Stieg Larsson.
David Lagercrantz
#29. I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.
D.A. Botta
#30. When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'
Julia Glass
#31. 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
#32. When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'
Mara Wilson
#33. The writer's no different. When he's rejected, that paper is rejected, in a sense, a sizeable fragment of the writer is rejected as well. It's a piece of himself that's being turned down.
Rod Serling
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I can remember when
delusions of grandeur
entailed wanting to
be a rock star, movie star,
a millionaire; to make it
as a writer
now it seems that it's
to want to earn a
decent living
Phil Volatile
#37. ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.
Ambrose Bierce
#38. You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
Tony Kushner
#39. I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.
Noah Hawley
#40. To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.
George Saunders
#41. There's something more surprising than becoming a bestseller, and that's receiving messages of hate by other fellow authors.
Daniel Marques
#42. I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.
Salman Rushdie
#43. I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.
Neil Gaiman
#44. No sense in a man with writer's block going to New York.
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. Writing is more than just a method to tell stories. It's a way to find healing, and to healing others.
M. Kirin
#46. Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
Charles Bukowski
#47. Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
Ben H. Winters
#48. I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.
Taylor Mali
#49. Writer? Author? Storyteller, that's what I decided to be.
Robert McCammon
#50. 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
#51. It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.
Seeley James
#52. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
George Orwell
#53. All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#54. That's a really good question - what is it like living with a writer? I guess it depends on the writer. You know what? They live in a fantasy world a lot of the time. My husband lives in a fantasy world.
Rene Russo
#55. A humorist is a writer who's not funny enough to call themselves a comedian.
Dan Alatorre
#56. A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
Chaim Potok
#57. I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.
Clint Eastwood
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. My wife and I always comment that our lives are relatively mundane. She's a writer as well, I'm a writer, we spend most of our time writing, and kind of going to yoga in Brooklyn.
Mike Birbiglia
#62. Words can't describe... shouldn't be in a writer's vocabulary.
Mary M. Forbes
#63. The most important thing is to live an interesting life. Keep your eyes, ears and heart open. Talk to people and visit interesting places, and don't forget to ask questions. To be a writer you need to drink in the world around you so it's always there in your head.
Michael Morpurgo
#64. I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
Stephen King
#65. My philosophy has always been if I can learn just one thing from an article or book on writing, it's worth it.
Writer's Digest Books
#66. Because books are alive. They are more alive than you and me. Books live forever. They live on in their own jackets. They live on in their reader's memory. They live on in their writer's minds.
Susan Shultz
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Thomas Mann
#70. Motown was the mecca. It was every writer's dream to work there.
Valerie Simpson
#71. 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
#72. That's what I try to do as a writer and as the editor of HuffPost: cover important stories in an obsessive way that enables them to break through the din of our multimedia universe.
Arianna Huffington
#73. I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
Christy Hall
#74. 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
#75. I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the problem is.
Cassandra Clare
#76. And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.
Tim LaHaye
#77. Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.
Jennifer Hudson Taylor
#78. I don't believe in writer's block. If I can't write, I go out and live. Then, if I'm a writer, I'll find something to write.
Peter Arpesella
#79. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#80. My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It's not anything lofty, and it doesn't have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.
Anne Lamott
#81. There's a whole language out there, and one's role as a writer is to stumble around in it.
Ciaran Carson
#82. Leave it to a writer's mind to add two and two together and come up with 69.
Stjepan Sejic
#83. Why does Kubrick always chill our blood, and make us huddled up scared stiff with eyes wide shut? Because even dead he's still "Shinnying" with his old hand and his eye-catching plots.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#84. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of their books
Brandon Sanderson
#86. 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
#87. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
#88. 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
#89. Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!
Rashers Tierney
#90. The only reason you can't write is because you don't.
A.A. Patawaran
#91. It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.
Margaret Atwood
#92. A writer always begins by being too complicated - he's playing at several games at once.
Jorge Luis Borges
#93. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#94. I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.
Sara Sheridan
#95. 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
#96. I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.
John Dufresne
#97. Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
Italo Calvino
#98. I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.
Alice Lowe
#99. There is one person who can help solve 'writer's block'. His name is Mr. Johnnie Walker.
Ashwin Sanghi
#100. I think in life there is only one absolute truth.
Death ... It's the only definitive horizon, sometime it leaps, runs across mountains and vanishes beyond oceans but the closer you get, the more you see and you know it is the final destination, the absolute truth. We are only living to die.
Crystal Evans
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