Writer That Quotes

#1. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

Gore Vidal

#2. Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed.

Emily Fridlund

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

Sara Sheridan

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Gerald Brenan

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Margaret Anderson

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Betsy Lerner

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Mrs. Ball has got a daughter who is a writer. I asked her how her daughter qualified to be one. Mrs. Ball said that her daughter was dropped on her head as a child and has been "a bit queer" ever since.

Sue Townsend

#34. As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'

Mark Billingham

#35. Oftentimes what happens is that the writer understands one character, but they don't understand the other one, and the other one ends up not being written as well.

Jennifer Beals

#36. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.

Timothy Pina

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

John Irving

#40. And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Ezra Pound

#41. 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

#42. I believed God had wired me as a writer for a purpose, and I was squandering that purpose. I finally repented of doing things my way and told God that, in the future, I would only write books that glorified Him. That meant I had to buy back some of my contracts.

Terri Blackstock

#43. Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

Chuck Palahniuk

#44. Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.

Lisa Unger

#45. You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.

Frank Black

#46. A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#47. 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

#48. I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.

Erica Jong

#49. I have this desire to have this immaculate form of love that really doesn't exist, so my obsession goes on through life and I never find it and I end up miserable. But it makes me a better writer.

Angel Haze

#50. I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person.

Hanya Yanagihara

#51. Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.

Annie Dillard

#52. I enjoy taking jobs that make fun of me - or me as Princess Leia, or me as the writer, or whatever, as some idea.

Carrie Fisher

#53. 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

#54. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

Maya Angelou

#55. The world was doing its best to ignore the fact that I was a writer.

Wayne Koestenbaum

#56. My film school is making movies. But, I do think that being an actor has served me immensely, as both a writer and director, in terms of knowing what is playable and what will be fun to play, for actors, and also how to communicate to actors on set, and not screw them up and get them in their head.

Josh Radnor

#57. I find it very disturbing to be advertised, as I have noticed that it is the advertised authors that stink. I am pretty sure I am going to stink from now on, and it might just as well be in Harpers as anywhere else, I suppose. A writer is like a beanplant-he has his day and then he gets stringy.

E.B. White

#58. 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

#59. I'm such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don't need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.

Fran Lebowitz

#60. There's something more surprising than becoming a bestseller, and that's receiving messages of hate by other fellow authors.

Daniel Marques

#61. 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

#62. I knew that I always wanted to be a filmmaker, an actor, a writer and a director, that was always my plan.

Jaime King

#63. Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

Joyce Carol Oates

#64. It is always a high possibility to see lights after midnight in the house of a writer! That is the light of the love for words!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#65. 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

#66. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

William Golding

#67. Writer? Author? Storyteller, that's what I decided to be.

Robert McCammon

#68. I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

Dani Shapiro

#69. It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

Seeley James

#70. The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ...

Natalie Goldberg

#71. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Haruki Murakami

#72. I think that the direction in which a writer should look is around.

Dorothy Parker

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

Don DeLillo

#76. No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

Storm Jameson

#77. I think one of the reasons movies are the quintessential modern art form is that it is partially a business. The director needs a crew - the writer, the producer, etcetera - and to have that, he needs money.

Roger Corman

#78. I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

Kurt Vonnegut

#79. I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

Kevin Spacey

#80. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.

H. Raven Rose

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. I've always wanted to be a writer. Always been very creative. I always laughed at things that the rest of my family would sort of get angry, like not understand.

Bonnie McFarlane

#84. The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211

Steven Pinker

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

E.B. White

#89. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...

Kurt Vonnegut

#90. The thing about this band is that every member of the band is a song-writer so that takes some of the pressure off.

Joey Jordison

#91. 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

#92. I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

Robert Cormier

#93. Launching a new TV show is probably one of the most difficult things that a writer can do.

George Meyer

#94. You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If I'd listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.

Philipp Meyer

#95. I was playing the game where I was going to be a great TV or film writer some day and there was nothing else that I thought about, including other people.

Dan Harmon

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

Linwood Barclay

#99. 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

#100. Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.

Alice Dreger