Top 95 Writers Craft Quotes
#1. I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.
Antonia Fraser
#2. We're all in this together - when one writer succeeds, all writers succeed. I love discovering new authors. I think we need to take care of each other and talk about craft and nurture talent.
Lisa Gardner
#3. Developing your voice takes ...
time and practice.
Darynda Jones
#4. The great thing about 'Justified' is that the writers will craft a scene, but if the actors come up with a great idea, they're 100% for it.
Neal McDonough
#5. Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#7. To practice - write each and every day if possible - then try to attend professional writer's conferences where you can learn your craft, get to know fellow writers, and meet editors and agents.
James Dashner
#8. Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers. From reading.
Marie Arana
#9. An unedited manuscript is a first draft of story; but is not a finished product. Too many writers study the craft of writing but do not acquire the skills of an editor.
Michael J. Kannengieser
#10. Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.
Roman Payne
#11. All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.
Aporva Kala
#12. Everything starts and ends with the song, and working with writers and really learning their process and craft was an invaluable experience.
Tommy Mottola
#13. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.
Elliott Colla
#14. I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.
Christy Hall
#15. Being a writer is a rather hazardous occupation and there is a horribly high rate of writers who barely have the money for the paper and pen they use for their craft.
Herbert Gold
#16. If you do not want to be forgotten as soon as you are dead...be read, or try coming back and pull the feet of those who are still alive instead!
Ana Claudia Antunes
#17. So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.
Annie Dillard
#18. Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
Van Wyck Brooks
#20. It's good to write badly. Things can only get better.
Alan Dapre
#22. Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.
Phyllis A. Whitney
#23. Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?
Hannah Harding
#24. I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear.
K.M. Soehnlein
#25. There are as many routes to writing success as there are writers who got there. My advice, however, applies across the board: read widely, learn the craft by whatever means you can - workshops and writing programs are ideal, but even self-study can work - apply what you learn, and persevere.
Therese Fowler
#26. Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? "Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat ... " That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!
Jim C. Hines
#27. On working with other writers: You develop honesty and you can then ask the really embarrassing questions. I have learned so many things I didn't want to know, and they were all a result of interesting interviews for background information.
Dan Alatorre
#28. A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.
Maria Reeves
#29. I've always thought that a lot of really good writers go wrong by getting so into the craft and the technique and perfection. Perfection can be the enemy sometimes. Some songs don't need to be told perfectly. Life is messy and has loose ends, and sometimes I think the songs should reflect that.
Patterson Hood
#30. Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.
Johnny Rich
#31. Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.
Henry Louis Gates
#32. Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.
Amy Joy
#33. Writers of nonfiction have the right - perhaps even the responsibility - to access the wonders of the writer's craft to make their work interesting and enjoyable.
Sol Stein
#34. Our culture places a very high value on storytelling, and the more that Catholic writers are able to master that craft, the more they can speak to the culture, the more powerful their stories will be.
Regina Doman
#35. And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.
Darynda Jones
#36. Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.
Colson Whitehead
#37. Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.
Christy Hall
#38. Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.
Christy Hall
#39. Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.
Patricia C. Wrede
#40. It's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft
they just do it
Alfred Lansing
#41. When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete ... you feel as if you could do anything.
Christy Hall
#42. Thousands of years ago, there were no writers; just storytellers. I would love to be a storyteller but I am just a writer. I don't appeal to the ears; I appeal to the mind.
King Samuel Benson
#43. Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.
Red Haircrow
#44. The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.
Don Roff
#45. An author is similar to an actor. They play many characters in their lives - photographer, nurse, dancer, doctor, writer, etc. As an author, you have to learn your craft, know each and every element to become that character you're writing about to be able to live and breathe what they do.
Mischa Temaul
#46. Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.
Luke Taylor
#47. I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen.
Fennel Hudson
#48. Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#51. Today is the day that you create worlds, you change lives, you make a something, a someone, out of nothing.
Today is the day you become a writer.
Alessandra Torre
#52. Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.
Lisa Cron
#53. Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.
Robert M. Pirsig
#54. There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
Umberto Eco
#55. If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.
Fennel Hudson
#56. Where do writers get their ideas from? Anywhere and everywhere.
Nothing is sacred.
Darynda Jones
#57. Not all writers are crazy. Only the ones who are serious enough about their craft.
Hanna Abi Akl
#58. Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!
Avijeet Das
#59. A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
Roman Payne
#60. Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.
Shannon Celebi
#61. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#62. 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
#63. What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.
Fennel Hudson
#64. I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.
Jack Jordan
#65. 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
#66. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#67. Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
Dan Alatorre
#69. 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
#70. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.
Michelle M. Pillow
#71. It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.
Seeley James
#72. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#73. Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we've thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#74. I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.
Gore Vidal
#75. I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone.
Shannon Celebi
#76. Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days ... it will demand absolutely everything of you.
Christy Hall
#77. Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Bernard Cornwell
#78. I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.
John Searles
#79. Writers are born, not made. We can hone the craft. We need to try to encourage someone and make a dialogue, suggesting ways to do something differently or how to improve.
Alan Zweibel
#80. I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.
Antonya Nelson
#81. I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
Orson Scott Card
#82. Writers don't choose their craft; they need to write in order to face the world.
Alice Hoffman
#83. Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
Stephen King
#84. Writing is hard. That's why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.
[There Is No Such Thing as Writers' Block: Blog post, October 7, 2001]
Andy Ihnatko
#85. In barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote.
Cesar Aira
#86. We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.
Ross Macdonald
#87. It takes thirty-three days to write a book
only thirty-three days. remember, writers lie for a living.
Darynda Jones
#88. There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.
Mark Billingham
#89. If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.
Lisa Cron
#91. Future writers hide inside books and snort up the craft by enjoyment. They read and learn structure and style. Their curiosity points them to subject matter.
James Ellroy
#92. I want to be able to discuss craft but I also want to teach writers to trust their instincts and learn to listen to themselves above all others.
Mary J. Miller
#93. Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#94. I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
Eleanor Catton
#95. Where the writing takes place doesn't matter to a publisher, but it matters a great deal to the author.
Fennel Hudson
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