Writer Writing Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Daniel Alarcon

#3. A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

E.B. White

#4. It's been a very interesting exercise as a writer - writing a little family group, like The Incredibles or The Simpsons or something like that, and setting it in a big Star Wars-type setting. It's been really fun, definitely different from the kind of thing I normally do.

Mark Millar

#5. Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

Sinclair Lewis

#6. It's a very dull thing to watch, a writer at work. So dull that whole casts of characters show up just to watch the boring writer writing.

Debi Gliori

#7. It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Natalie Goldberg

#8. I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

Karen Allen

#9. I eventually want to do writing on all the films, but not necessarily to be the writer. Writing is a painful, painful thing; it really is.

Cary Fukunaga

#10. I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Alice Walker

#11. The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

Rhianna Pratchett

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Sara Sheridan

#15. 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

#16. I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

Avi

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

Gerald Brenan

#18. A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

Baron De Montesquieu

#19. Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Niall Williams

#20. Teach the writer, not the writing.

Lucy Calkins

#21. Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.

Steve Martin

#22. Writing for the love of writing. My muse makes no apologies under this pen name. ;)

Amanda Wylde

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

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

Betsy Lerner

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!

Samuel Colbran

#32. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

Francois Mauriac

#33. To be a good writer you must be a good reader".

Abdulazeez Henry Musa

#34. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.

Carla H. Krueger

#39. Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

J.R. Ward

#40. While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

Steve Erickson

#41. 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

#42. When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.
When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.

A. Saleh

#43. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

Lucille Clifton

#44. The challenge of the writer is to transform - artistically and imaginatively - a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.

Hillel F. Damron

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

William Faulkner

#49. 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

#50. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Irving Howe

#51. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.

Dana Brunetti

#52. 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

#53. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

Norman Mailer

#54. 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

#55. Sleeplessness and being a writer seem to go together hand in hand.

Jason E. Hodges

#56. Semicolons ... signal, rather than shout, a relationship ... A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."

George Will

#57. 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

#58. Even when I cannot write, I know I am still a writer, just the way I know I am still sexual even if I have not had a lover for many months.

Olga Broumas

#59. Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Mel Brooks

#60. 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

#61. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.

Robin Sacredfire

#62. The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do ... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

Donald Barthelme

#63. Writing is more than just a method to tell stories. It's a way to find healing, and to healing others.

M. Kirin

#64. Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

Charles Bukowski

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.

Chloe Thurlow

#68. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

Morris West

#69. If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.

Jorge Luis Borges

#70. In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.

R.M. Engelhardt

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

Seeley James

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

Clive James

#75. 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

#76. A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

Wally Lamb

#77. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.

Criss Jami

#78. A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

Jim Sturgess

#83. 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

#84. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

Cheryl Strayed

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal.
-The Carrie Diaries pg. 337

Candace Bushnell

#88. Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City ...

Christy Hall

#89. 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

#90. I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.

Wesley D. Gray

#91. The writer's life is frightful

Lailah Gifty Akita

#92. A pen name is a nickname.

A.D. Posey

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

E.L. Doctorow

#96. 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

#97. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

Jamie L. Harding

#98. I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.

Toni Morrison

#99. As a writer I'm merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#100. If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

Ernest Hemingway,