Top 100 Writers Are 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. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
Dinaw Mengestu
#3. Nobody thinks mystery writers go around killing people, but they always seem to assume singers are singing about themselves, especially if you write melancholy songs like me.
Del Shannon
#4. All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something.
Michael Kimmelman
#5. Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde
#6. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.
Dara Horn
#7. Cherish every relationship in your life. There are certain things in life that can't be fixed if broken!
Avijeet Das
#8. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#9. Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.
Fay Weldon
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.
Jane Hirshfield
#13. Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn't play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.
Stephen Vizinczey
#14. There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.
Stephen Daldry
#15. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.
John Scalzi
#16. Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#17. Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.
Lauren Tarshis
#18. There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU.
Pandora Gray
#19. Writers are diffident creatures
they need encouragement.
Agatha Christie
#20. Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.
Tom Bissell
#21. We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.
Anais Nin
#22. One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.
Kathy Reichs
#23. These young writers nowadays. They spend more time networking to promote their writing careers than writing their books. Maybe that's why there are so few good ones anymore.
Lauren Carr
#24. The writers are the stars of every really successful sitcom.
Betty White
#25. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire
#26. It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.
Kristen Lamb
#27. What we need to do, as writers, is find out where our market is and adapt to it. I'm not saying that you follow every trend slavishly, but what you see is that, if there is a sea-change in the way that things are being done, then you account for it.
John Scalzi
#28. 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
#29. Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.
Gertrude Stein
#30. Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism. ~Angelica Hopes
Angelica Hopes
#31. Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Eudora Welty
#32. You are lovelier than all the roses in the world.
Avijeet Das
#33. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
Anthony Burgess
#34. In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
Sol Stein
#35. 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
#36. Most writers have very little that's important or valuable to offer; most of them are just repeating each other.
Pankaj Mishra
#37. My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.
Ruta Sepetys
#38. I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.
Anna Quindlen
#39. 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.
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Who knows where the talent goes? Sometimes it goes where the money is. Sometimes I think writers are really interested in the glory.
Matthew Weiner
#43. 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
#44. Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors.
John Dryden
#45. I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood.
Ned Beatty
#46. Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#47. 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
#48. American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Gore Vidal
#49. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
Adam Ross
#50. All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.
William, Saroyan
#51. Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere
Joan Didion
#52. As she only cries about once a year I really ought to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.
Dodie Smith
#53. I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
Francine Prose
#54. 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
#55. To paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow ... we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible.
Robert Krulwich
#56. Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.
Adam Gopnik
#57. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
Neil Gaiman
#58. Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.
Rachel Thompson
#59. I think [Guettel is] probably one of our most special writers now, pushing things in ways that are unique.
Bartlett Sher
#60. I have daughters who are writers and actors but no musicians.
Rosanne Cash
#61. Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.
Robert Galbraith
#62. Now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book?
Dan Savage
#63. Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.
George Lucas
#64. 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
#65. Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
Manuel Puig
#66. Like actors and writers who are on and off again in terms of employment, I had a very unstructured life.
Buzz Aldrin
#67. There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.
Sean Bean
#68. The greatest thing about having done 'Orange' are the doors that have opened for me, and people have been able to see me, like the executives and the casting directors - also, all of the fantastic directors and writers for independent films.
Ruby Rose
#69. The radical rightwing pegs Hollywood as a leftist town, which is completely wrong. There are a lot of actors, writers, and directors who talk a liberal agenda ... but all the studio bosses, for as long as there have been studios, have all been as far rightwing as you can possibly imagine.
Paul Haggis
#70. Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic.
Vivianne Crowley
#71. I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
M.K. Hobson
#72. No shame in having a ghostwriter," Storm said. "Some of the best books published every year are penned by talented writers whose identity the public will never know.
Richard Castle
#73. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
Robert Galbraith
#74. 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
#75. If you're a politician it's very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.
Michael Pollan
#76. I don't have to work extra hard, but that's because there are a lot of women in my professional network and I have hired a lot of women as full-time writers and part-time columnists.
Ann Friedman
#77. Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
Barry Unsworth
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.
Hanya Yanagihara
#81. More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.
M.V. Carey
#82. I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.
Adolf Hitler
#83. Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.
Tillie Olsen
#84. I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.
Ellen Datlow
#85. I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.
Ian Hunter
#86. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.
Julia Stiles
#87. If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.
Jamaica Kincaid
#88. I'm very happy to make specific choices (as an actor), (but) you can't be married to them because you never know when the writers are going to be like, "By the way, you have no brothers, you have a sister."
Anna Chlumsky
#89. Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Alberto Moravia
#91. GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.
Lisa Washington
#92. So I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.
Stephen King
#93. All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.
Haniel Long
#94. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#95. The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
J.M. Coetzee
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.
Karl Shapiro
#99. Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and remember they are men, will be our favorites.
Benjamin Disraeli
#100. I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more.
Garry Hynes
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