Top 100 Writer S Quotes
#1. There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.
Martin Amis
#2. I think a writer's first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven.
Noah Hawley
#3. The writer's silent mind is a period of intermission before orchestrating a symphony of words.
Khaled Talib
#4. I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.
Patton Oswalt
#5. A novel is a writer's rant disguised as entertainment ...
James Minter
#6. There's no such thing as writer's block," she proclaimed. "If you can't write it's because you don't have anything to say. Or you're avoiding something.
Candace Bushnell
#7. here's the thing: However attractive the idea of a writer's retreat may sound, having all day to poke around on a novel actually hampers productivity.
Chris Baty
#8. I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
Jess Walter
#9. The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll.
Chuck Klosterman
#10. I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.
Lillian R. Melendez
#11. Do not let the writer's authority or learning influence you, be it little or great, but let the love of pure truth attract you to read. Do not ask, 'Who said this?' but pay attention to what is said.
Thomas A Kempis
#12. Read a ton, write every day if you can, and don't mimic another writer's style. Find your own voice.
James Patterson
#13. Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work.
Yukio Mishima
#14. You're not one of those despicable literary sleuths who think he can deduce every last little sordid biographical detail from a writer's work, are you?
Jonathan Galassi
#15. A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!
Christie Silvers
#16. Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys.
Roy Peter Clark
#17. What's the importance of a photograph if you know the writer's work? But people still want the image, don't they? The writer's face is the surface of the work. It's a clue to the mystery inside.
Don DeLillo
#18. That was, in writing the 'Twilight' script I had about five weeks to write that. I'd taken about a month to write the outline and then it was slam into a script and write it down fast because the writer's strike was looming.
Melissa Rosenberg
#19. Don't ever let yourself surrender to writer's block.
Julie Wenzel
#20. A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.
E.B. White
#21. The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?
Jerry Pournelle
#22. I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer's life. On the other hand, it's good to have another job. It gives you something to do.
Tom Paulin
#23. What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.
William Faulkner
#24. As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.
Phyllis A. Whitney
#25. The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black.
Roberto Bolano
#26. We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
Alain De Botton
#27. Many times, what people call 'writer's block' is the confusion that happens when a writer has a great idea, but their writing skill is not up to the task of putting that idea down on paper. I think that learning the craft of writing is critical.
Pearl Cleage
#29. I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But that's never been something I'm capable of doing.
Rachel Cusk
#30. You slogged from the terrifying emptiness of the blank page to the two most beautiful words in a writer's vocabulary: The End.
Lisa Cron
#31. Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?
Alex Turner
#32. He couldn't believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer's privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.
Cesar Aira
#33. The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination.
J.L. Bond
#35. A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.
Edna Ferber
#36. A writer's high doesn't come from thinking about the end result, only of the moment, one word, one sentence, one phrase at a time.
C.J. Heck
#37. To practice - write each and every day if possible - then try to attend professional writer's conferences where you can learn your craft, get to know fellow writers, and meet editors and agents.
James Dashner
#38. Collaboration is a nice change of pace from the often solitary nature of the writer's craft.
Edward M. Lerner
#39. A writer's two greatest tools are imagination and perseverance.
Mark Rubinstein
#40. Writer's block comes from one's wanting only to write good stuff. Well, the good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
Eric Olsen
#41. A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.
Nelson Algren
#42. The first draft of a story is the writer's clay.
Bruce Coville
#43. Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field.
Jane Haddam
#44. I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.
Anthony Kiedis
#45. I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like the little-magazine writer.
Barry Hannah
#47. A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first
Louis L'Amour
#48. [From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.
Dorothy Parker
#49. Smart authors, faced with storms, chose to create umbrellas. That's why a diverse group of authors banded together to create The Fiction Writer's Co-op, which will work to find innovative ways to promote each other's work and cheer each other on in a very competitive field.
M.J. Rose
#50. Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.
Leland Ryken
#51. Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.
Alice McDermott
#52. Writing is so much more productive when it is set on fire, for then and only then can you feel the passion spewing forth from the writer's heart.
Jennifer Megan Varnadore
#53. When I went to America I had two secretaries, one for autographs, one for locks of hair. Within six months the one had died of writer's cramp, the other was completely bald.
Oscar Wilde
#54. The writer's shortness of breath became more and more distressing as he rose.
Hudson Stuck
#55. The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.
Susan Sontag
#56. I always send new writers to 'Writer's Digest Books' line-up of how-to books. I read them all when I was starting out, and they were very helpful.
Gail Z. Martin
#57. I've wanted to direct for a long time, but it had to be a story I wanted to tell. The writer's job is to find the story that he should tell.
Peter Hedges
#58. I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.
Charles Kuralt
#59. A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience ... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.
John L'Heureux
#60. I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
Doris Lessing
#61. The downs are the times when you lose sight of who you are and that happens along the way sometimes ... Writer's block when you doubt yourself and you get insecure.
Lights
#62. Metaphor reveals a writer's true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.
Norman Mailer
#63. A writer's job is done once the lines touch reader's forbidden chords.
Shreya Gupta
#64. In truth, age is a writer's ally. The greater the experience, the more we have to say. More time to learn important truths, to establish a more expansive point of view, to refine skills and find your voice, and infinitely more stories to be told.
Randy Kraft
#65. If I behave like a good boy and take my Prozac ... then I won't be able to write anymore.
I'll have Writer's block from not being able to communicate with the characters in my mind.
Timothy Pina
#66. I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation.
James Patterson
#67. Writer's block to me is where you stop because you're afraid to go forward because you're not sure of what really should be happening next and you think, my gosh, if I choose this ... you've got a hundred millions of avenues you could possibly go down but it's all an assess of characters.
Homer Hickam
#68. I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.
Taylor Dane
#69. There are three certainties in a writer's life: death, taxes, and rejection letters.
T.L. Rese
#70. Especially when writers are just starting out, the emphasis should be not only upon what they write, but equally upon the process of writing. A successful class is a class where no one feels that 'writer's block' is a high-priority subject.
Mary Oliver
#71. Garrison Keillor read several of my poems on 'The Writer's Almanac' and I've heard from listeners nationally and internationally. That's one of the great gifts of email.
Ellen Bass
#72. It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
William Faulkner
#73. If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?
Cory Doctorow
#74. Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy.
Arthur Evans
#75. It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.
Vasily Grossman
#76. But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader's awareness of the human condition, in the writer's touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady's slip, should be there but it must not show.
Bel Kaufman
#77. Lots of people were giving me flak when I made the deal to do the very last season of Scrubs for $350,000 an episode. When really I'm the one that's being cheated, because the writer's strike is keeping me from all the money that I could be making. I need to eat, too.
Zach Braff
#78. Praising heroes who slay monsters is a writer's most ancient task.
David Burr Gerrard
#79. I have a cheat-sheet for each one of my characters about their personality, the way they look, etc. So there is no possible way that I could have writer's block.
R.L. Stine
#80. Usually writer's block arises when something is wrong internally with the story.
Meg Cabot
#81. Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.
Jeanette Winterson
#82. A writer's refuge is imagination and the possibilities it provides.
Mark Rubinstein
#83. That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.
Tobias Wolff
#84. Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.
Gabrielle Roy
#85. What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#86. Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.
Joe Haldeman
#88. I don't think film is the writer's medium, and so I was interested to see what a director would do with it.
Daniel Handler
#89. I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.
Athol Fugard
#90. Much of the time I'm an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer's sensibility.
Robyn Davidson
#91. If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read 'The Midnight Disease' by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain. I know what's wrong with me!
Dorothea Benton Frank
#92. I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.
Kurt Vonnegut
#93. Because we spent so much time in the writer's room, not even talking about where it goes, but just who the people are in our world, we could find all those unexpected moments and twists and turns that we didn't even see ourselves.
Veena Sud
#94. A writer's role was never just to tell stories, but to create a world to encompass and share with others.
Solange Nicole
#95. The writer's is an interior world, a world of the mind.
Vikas Swarup
#96. People like to stop reading when they've finished a chapter, not in the middle of a chapter. This is probably the last thing they'll tell you at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, but it's a reality
Shawn Coyne
#97. It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#98. The writer's job is to let the books speak for themselves eventually.
Dean Bakopoulos
#99. The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.
Fran Lebowitz
#100. I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.
Dean Young
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