Writers And Their Quotes

#1. Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

Lynn Abbey

#2. ... unpacked her books, her sweet delight in happier days, and her soothing resource in the hours of moderate sorrow: but there were hours when even these failed of their effect; when the genius, the taste, the enthusiasm of the sublimest writers were felt no longer.

Ann Radcliffe

#3. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

Virginia Woolf

#4. It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.

Rachel Weisz

#5. Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#6. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

P.D. James

#7. Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Jeffery Deaver

#8. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.

Louis L'Amour

#9. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

Saul David

#10. Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

Eudora Welty

#11. Actors and writers need to come back to the theater because it's a place where you can learn. You have to pay your dues, and people who haven't paid their dues in the theater, I think, have a hard time creating a whole career.

Joanne Woodward

#12. The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

William Strunk Jr.

#13. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

Hanya Yanagihara

#14. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!

Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!

Avijeet Das

#15. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#16. Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

John Perry Barlow

#17. Most fledgling and mid-list writers are lucky to be offered a 4-figure sum and are not only expected to deliver copy that needs minimal editing but also take an active part in marketing and publicizing their work.

Sara Sheridan

#18. Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed in.

Noah Cicero

#19. Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

Manuel Puig

#20. Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

Stanley Schmidt

#21. Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable

Friedrich Nietzsche

#22. At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.

Chuck Klosterman

#23. Reviewers are certainly entitled to their own opinions. I've become buddies with enough writers and directors, and to be perfectly honest, the ones that have lasted a long time don't pay a lot of attention to the reviews.

Evan Daugherty

#24. If stone-sober people can fuck like they're out of their minds
can actually be out of their minds while caught in that throe
why shouldn't writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane?

Stephen King

#25. I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character's sexuality is fascinating. It's a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it's such a personal thing.

Alan Ball

#26. For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL

Michelle M. Pillow

#27. I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

Clive Barker

#28. I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Ann Brashares

#29. He has discovered the truths that keep writers chained to their desks: the primacy of the inner life and the sheer exhilaration of creating a world from scratch.

Barbara Klein Moss

#30. Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#31. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.

Bjornstjerne Bjornson

#32. An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they're creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can't make it better.

Johnny Rich

#33. Most writers adore their editors, and I'm no exception.

Linda Sue Park

#34. Books were expensive, as well. But she'd read enough of them to know that they were only as valuable as the contents of their writers' minds - and to her it seemed that a great many writers, had they been merchants, would have precious little inventory.

Jim Butcher

#35. Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.

Kate Braverman

#36. Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.

Patricia Hampl

#37. When I was starting out, the first women studio heads and writers were just getting into their perches - development execs learning their chops.

Lynda Obst

#38. A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere
even in prison.

Louis Auchincloss

#39. It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.

Robert E. Howard

#40. I am the breeze. I drift and I wander. I meet people and i touch their hearts. but people don't stay with me. They leave me. And I keep on drifting and keep on wandering. That's my life.

Avijeet Das

#41. Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either.

Aminatta Forna

#42. I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.

Wole Soyinka

#43. Conversely, high-reactive children may be more likely to develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar - and intellectually fertile - environment of their own heads.

Susan Cain

#44. And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

Michel De Montaigne

#45. The world has obviously changed in terms of the way filmmakers and actors and writers often look at their own careers. They all seem to want to include in their own process - along with some of their iconic and franchise-driven movies.

Mark Canton

#46. To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Steven Heighton

#47. We're huge fans of 'Game of Thrones' for example, 'Orphan Black.' And even though those shows don't necessarily correlate directly with 'Arrow,' I'm a very big believer that writers are the product of their inspirations.

Marc Guggenheim

#48. Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.

Evelyn Waugh

#49. Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

Robert Morgan

#50. Great writers zealously learn the craft of their profession so they can release the power and the depth of their imagination and experience.

Leonard Bishop

#51. Writers always put themselves into their work. But you can't just untangle it and take it back to its source.

Jeanette Winterson

#52. Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This
the actual pistols
was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.

William Faulkner

#53. Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it.

Alexander McCall Smith

#54. Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.

Ally Carter

#55. I admire writers who have the tenacity to write a blog, and I'm told by everyone that it's an important element in remaining visible in the online world. That said, I'm personally turned off by writers' blogs that do nothing but sing their own accomplishments.

David Starkey

#56. Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

Marguerite Young

#57. That's ONE thing that's wrong with intellectuals and writers - they don't feel a hell of a lot except their own comfort or their own pain. which is normal but shitty.

Charles Bukowski

#58. What we need is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that.

Kathleen Turner

#59. Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

Lee Gutkind

#60. There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

Michael Longley

#61. I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don't function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I'm even ready to write.

Wole Soyinka

#62. Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.

Sarah Colliver

#63. Things that only a writer would understand - you're writing a character - you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.

Lisa Marbly-Warir

#64. The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.

George R R Martin

#65. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.

Michelle Tea

#66. To read Hotel Angeline is to celebrate how this diverse group of writers (and readers, all of them) can pool their talents and expertise to come up with such an entertaining and soul-satisfying novel.

Nancy Pearl

#67. When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Doris Lessing

#68. Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

Edmund White

#69. I feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go.

Sam Shepard

#70. Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Salman Rushdie

#71. I don't watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when you're alone and someone's voice is coming through their work. There's a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more.

Dylan Moran

#72. [ ... ]all men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear[ ... ]

Terry Pratchett

#73. How many writers are there ... who, breaking up their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us of the whole by their anxiety about the parts.

John Henry Newman

#74. Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.

Jandy Nelson

#75. Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Sherman Alexie

#76. Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

Elizabeth George

#77. We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

John Updike

#78. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Charles Frazier

#79. There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#80. The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately.

Jean De La Bruyere

#81. There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

Eleanor Catton

#82. I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

Ray Bradbury

#83. Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Herbert Gold

#84. I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.

Louise Erdrich

#85. There are writers' rooms that will write episodes all together, who will break into little groups and write certain scenes. Everyone's process can be a little bit malleable. Everyone tries to get into a groove or find what works for their room.

Jim Rash

#86. Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

Irwin Shaw

#87. I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.

Jonathan Lethem

#88. Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

F. Sionil Jose

#89. Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

#90. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#91. Among the writers of all ages, some deserve fame, and have it; others neither have nor deserve it; some have it, not deserving it; others, though deserving it, yet totally miss it, or have it not equal to their deserts.

John Milton

#92. I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work - one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#93. In Soviet writing the demonization of all forms of Ukrainian nationalism has a long tradition, and would make an interesting study in itself. Soviet writers considered almost any criticism of their state - and, from the 1930s, of the Russian Empire - as "fascist" or "counterrevolutionary,

Myroslav Shkandrij

#94. Where do writers get their ideas from? Anywhere and everywhere.
Nothing is sacred.

Darynda Jones

#95. I'm turning into an old man. I own four pairs of oxfords, my stories get a little long winded, and my neighbors play their music too loud.

Christy Hall

#96. Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.

Roman Payne

#97. I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.

A.S. Byatt

#98. Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you'll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery.

Valeria Luiselli

#99. A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.

Peter Schjeldahl

#100. Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman.

Grant Morrison