Top 100 Writers Book Quotes
#1. I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college.
Colson Whitehead
#2. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.
Beth Revis
#3. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
#4. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The fact is, unlike a lot of writers, I credit the people who help me. A lot of writers out there have a ton of researchers and they don't get credited in the book.
Graydon Carter
#8. 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
#9. Only a true reader will understand how lovely it is to read a book on rainy days.
Nicholaa Spencer
#11. Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it.
Van Morrison
#12. Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!
William Attwood
#13. Do you remember the time, Mike," Jeremy laughed, "that you put a banana down your pants and walked up to the Palma-nator. It looked like you had one hell of a hard-on.
Buffy Andrews
#14. Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.
Sherry Thomas
#15. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
#16. You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.
M.J. Rose
#17. You will need seed money, so begin saving for your book. Don't give up. Also, write down the ideas that you have right away so you don't lose them.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#18. I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path.
Sue Grafton
#19. One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
Justin Cronin
#21. TRIGGER CITY secures Sean Chercover's place as one of the best crime writers of his generation. It grabs you hard on the first page and doesn't let go, even after you've closed the book.
Tasha Alexander
#22. A good reader has the power to move the world.
Aman Jassal
#23. I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day.
Christopher Bollen
#24. If you write a bad book, mobs do not show up with pitchforks and torches - and odds are you didn't write something bad.
Dan Alatorre
#25. You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before
" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.
Philip K. Dick
#26. I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.
Sunny
#27. The illustrators work so much harder on the books than the writers do. I mean, that's so much work doing what they do, and it's terrible for them.
Michael Ian Black
#28. What crime writers are doing connects deeper into a cultural hunger. Crime is important. When you open up a book that has a body that's dead, that matters. It matters more than a certain level of suburban angst; it really does.
S.J. Rozan
#29. 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
#30. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
#31. Publication is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing the book is only the start.
Jo Linsdell
#32. 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
#33. In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
Junot Diaz
#34. 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
#35. It comes a point in which you don't know if you write books or the books write you
Robin Sacredfire
#36. I would like to see more new productions of new material by new composers/lyricists/book writers. I would like to see people take more chances. I think because everything costs so much they're not taking the chances they used to.
Harold Prince
#37. 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
#38. ...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#39. God has not any Holy Book; but Man has many Holy Book writers! Producing Holy Books is a cosmic crime against the God! God has not spoken yet! He has been silent for billions of years, because He is out of this universe!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#40. Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.
Joe Queenan
#41. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Margaret Atwood
#42. Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.
Ethan Canin
#43. Normally writers do not talk much,because they are saving their conversations for the readers of their book-
those invisible listeners with whom we wish to strike a sympathetic chord.
Ruskin Bond
#44. We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life.
Mark Cantrell
#45. What to do Before Your Book Launch is the new invaluable tool for writers. There is so much to know and now it's all in one place.
Julie Klam
#46. 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
#47. Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.
Sara Sheridan
#48. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.
A.D. Posey
#49. Never write when you are not in the mood; when you are not feeling it. If the words do not flow freely, and come to you almost magically, then put it down and do not force yourself to write in the book, or it will reflect in your writing and it will be terribly obvious.
Wayne Hoss
#50. I've read everything that Isaac Asimov ever wrote, for a start. I'm massively into my fantasy genre, anything by R.A. Salvatore or David Gemmell. I've read every single book those writers have written.
Robert Kazinsky
#51. Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library
Phillip Lopate
#52. Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
Margaret Atwood
#53. The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
#54. In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
Lauren Groff
#55. It's true that we, writers, write (create) books, but eventually, a good book gives birth to a good, established writer.
Tarang Sinha
#56. How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.
John Banville
#58. People can't read a book if they don't know it exists. All authors need to do marketing, regardless of how they published.
Jo Linsdell
#59. Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#60. People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
Virginia Woolf
#61. I often meet frustrated young writers who say they've only got so far and just can't finish a book. Even if you don't happen to use what you've worked on that day, it has taught you something and you'll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again.
Eoin Colfer
#62. Something significant, magical, and
inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of a book. You explore new lands, meet new people, feel new emotions, and are no longer the same person you were one word prior to reading it.
Martha Sweeney
#63. What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn't be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?
Saul Bellow
#64. A writer observes you far sharply than others and therefore you find your traits in a book.
Arvind Parashar
#65. Most writers are lazy intellectuals, and it's a goddamn shame because a writer with an audience has a moral responsibility to make readers think about the world in a different way than what they're used to. Why else would you pick up a book if not to inhabit another realm of existence for a while?
Kevin Keck
#66. The climate stubbornly refuses to co-operate with computer models and the writers of alarmist popular articles and books.
Ian Plimer
#67. Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.
Pope Leo XIII
#68. All I can say is that I am not one of those writers who want 100% of their book in the film. I recognize that film is a different medium and the filmmaker must have the right to bring some new elements to the table, provided the soul of the book is preserved.
Vikas Swarup
#69. All I really want to do today is go to the book store, drink coffee and read.
Ann Marie Frohoff
#70. We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.
Roger Angell
#71. Thoughts don't have time and space, one need to hold them. The one who succeeds at them becomes a writer.
Santosh Avvannavar
#72. I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.
Vivian Gornick
#73. All writers believe in the magic of books; Jim Hines has created a system where that magic becomes real, usable, and very definitely not always safe.
Tanya Huff
#74. The reason writers are such fragile beings, Marcus, is that they suffer from two sorts of emotional pain, which is twice as much as a normal human being: the heartache of love and the heartache of books. Writing a book is like loving someone. It can be very painful.
Joel Dicker
#75. Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
Carlos Fuentes
#76. Writers should be proud of the fact that they can do something that 99% of the public will never be able to do. You'll hear many, many people say to you, 'I think I'd like to write a book one day'. They won't. Because they haven't.
Stevyn Colgan
#77. The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.
Molly Ringwald
#78. To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book.
Neel Mukherjee
#79. Until you write books, you don't realize that the book does decide certain things. It must sound like complete insanity to non-writers. And maybe it is.
Christopher Bollen
#80. Every time someone opens a book and begins to read, a synergy between the reader and the writer occurs across time and space.
Jeanette O'Hagan
#81. The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.
Philip Pullman
#82. A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
Tea Obreht
#83. When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#84. What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
Gunter Grass
#85. Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.
Matthew Specktor
#86. If a book falls in the woods and nobody read it, was it ever written?
Neil Leckman
#87. I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.
Alan Lightman
#88. Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
Jim Crace
#89. Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
Tanith Lee
#90. I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
#91. Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
Andre Dubus III
#92. In Jason Fried's book Rework, he writes that one of the smartest investments a business can make is in hiring great writers, and I completely agree. No
Sophia Amoruso
#93. Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.
Louise Brown
#94. Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer?
A: Explaining what that is.
Christy Hall
#95. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Nikki Giovanni
#96. You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
David Remnick
#97. Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.
Chris Abani
#98. My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.
Sue Grafton
#99. It takes thirty-three days to write a book
only thirty-three days. remember, writers lie for a living.
Darynda Jones
#100. Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.
James A. Michener
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
