Top 100 Writer's Life Quotes
#1. A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.
Ronald Frame
#3. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
#4. I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.
Joan Didion
#5. A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen ... Except the act of writing.
E.L. Doctorow
#6. All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash)
Larry Brown
#7. If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?
Lauren B. Davis
#8. To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative
this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality.
Joyce Carol Oates
#9. The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it.
Bill Barich
#11. An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
Nick Harkaway
#13. 'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.
Mark Leyner
#14. A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.
Toni Morrison
#15. The writer's life is frightful. I have experienced deep dispair, mental ill and attempt of suicide.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#16. My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.
Paul Theroux
#18. How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'
Dani Shapiro
#19. I didn't intend to be writing - the writer's life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.
Sandra Cisneros
#20. Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life
Jerzy Kosinski
#21. I began to wonder if writers don't choose to love long-distance, a sure way of blending passion and prose. The love letter seems perfectly suited to the contradiction of a writer's life... the love letter may be the emblem of a vocation that demands solitude but desires communication.
Cathy N. Davidson
#22. Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.
Kingsley Amis
#23. The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#24. What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#25. Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.
Gabrielle Roy
#26. There are three certainties in a writer's life: death, taxes, and rejection letters.
T.L. Rese
#28. I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But that's never been something I'm capable of doing.
Rachel Cusk
#29. I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer's life. On the other hand, it's good to have another job. It gives you something to do.
Tom Paulin
#30. A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!
Christie Silvers
#31. I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Paul Theroux
#32. Nothing needs to happen to a writer's life after they are 20. By then they've experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
Flannery O'Connor
#33. A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.
Mavis Gallant
#34. A writer's life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
Joyce Carol Oates
#35. The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.
Dani Shapiro
#36. The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.
Julian Barnes
#37. An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.
Shannon L. Alder
#38. What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.
Susan Sontag
#39. I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.
Kate Christensen
#40. There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.
John Updike
#41. The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer's life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.
Sol Luckman
#42. Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. -
Stephen King
#43. It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
Amy Tan
#44. I feel that a book is never written by the writer alone
it's written by him and everyone around him be it directly or indirectly
Subhasis Das
#45. 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
#46. I can remember when
delusions of grandeur
entailed wanting to
be a rock star, movie star,
a millionaire; to make it
as a writer
now it seems that it's
to want to earn a
decent living
Phil Volatile
#47. You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
Tony Kushner
#48. A humorist is a writer who's not funny enough to call themselves a comedian.
Dan Alatorre
#49. The most important thing is to live an interesting life. Keep your eyes, ears and heart open. Talk to people and visit interesting places, and don't forget to ask questions. To be a writer you need to drink in the world around you so it's always there in your head.
Michael Morpurgo
#50. I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
Christy Hall
#51. You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.
Jake Kasdan
#52. I think in life there is only one absolute truth.
Death ... It's the only definitive horizon, sometime it leaps, runs across mountains and vanishes beyond oceans but the closer you get, the more you see and you know it is the final destination, the absolute truth. We are only living to die.
Crystal Evans
#53. 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
#54. A writer's thoughts can act as an Aladdin's lamp, which can enlighten and open the mind of a reader, by showing opportunities and beauties of life.
Debasish Mridha
#55. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
William Zinsser
#56. We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.
Steven Spielberg
#57. No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category.
Herman Koch
#58. For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.
Mary Garden
#59. Life's like a book: What matters is the hook.
Be it short or long, just live it strong.
Whether it's five stars, or how near or far, just soar!
Ana Claudia Antunes
#60. I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#61. For Christians who desire to write, the call to read broadly is an absolute necessity, for writing is, in many ways, the process of digesting and synthesizing not only the thoughts and experiences of a writer's own life, but the writer's intellectual wanderings as well.
Gene C. Fant Jr.
#62. Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.
Ernst Pawel
#63. Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.
Helen Garner
#64. When you're a writer, you pull your life into your work. My first love is cinema. That's where I want to be judged.
Roger Avary
#65. The homosexual community wants me to be gay. The heterosexual community wants me to be straight. Every writer thinks, I'm the journalist who's going to make him talk. I pray for them. I pray that they get a life and stop living mine!
Ricky Martin
#66. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#67. Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.
Peter S. Beagle
#68. A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Graham Greene
#69. Advice for a long and happy life - never tell a writer you have fixed their work. Ever.
C.S. Woolley
#70. Variety is definitely the spice of life but I love writing office romances (I was a secretary before I became a writer), because it's every girl's dream to meet that gorgeous hunky boss who sweeps her off her feet and takes her out of her dull routine.
Helen Brooks
#71. Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.
Shannon Celebi
#72. For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
Joyce Carol Oates
#73. I just write all the time. In my whole life I've never had what I've heard people talk about writer's block. I've never had that. Life is like a song to me. I just hear everything in music, so I have never once thought "Well, I'm never gonna be able to write again." I've got thousands of songs.
Dolly Parton
#74. Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.
Jodi Picoult
#75. There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That's a savage person who looks at everything as a story and, you know, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite.
Walter Kirn
#76. The most profound, life-altering gift you can offer the Indie writer you love is to TELL as MANY avid readers as you are able.
R.S. Guthrie
#77. I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.
Sue Grafton
#78. A man's ego can drive him either to heights of glory or to depths of misery!
Avijeet Das
#79. Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?
Hilary Mantel
#80. The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.
Orson Scott Card
#81. to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).
Steven James
#82. The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.
Debasish Mridha
#84. Writers don't always know what they mean - that's why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one.
John Lahr
#85. There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer.'
George Saunders
#86. I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.
Stewart Butterfield
#87. I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world ...
Alice Walker
#90. Returning to writing fiction after years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#91. ..here's the editor's prescription, writer: 1000 words daily until next checkup.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#92. I think people ease into this careerist professionalism, so if you're a writer it's your job to manufacture books as opposed to writing them and to go to festivals and spend your life emotionally invested in reviews or the awards. You have to shrink your universe in a way. To me, it's the opposite.
Arundhati Roy
#93. As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.
Mohsin Hamid
#95. I think I'm probably going to be one of those unnoticed Authors that get discovered well after I have passed on. I better drill into my daughter now on how I want my books to be abstracted into Television or Film before it's too late lol
Ellie Williams
#96. The man who comes to writing late, but is in essence a writer, may sometimes gain as much as he has lost: his experience of life has given him a subject, he is spared the youthful writer's self-torment and soul-searching.
Wright Morris
#97. I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.
[Writer's Digest Interview (Robert Jacobs, Writer's Digest, February 1976)]
Ray Bradbury
#100. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
Dinaw Mengestu
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
