Top 100 Writers Of Words Quotes
#1. The words that come out of your imagination are your own - just be sure they are.
Rusty Blackwood
#2. In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have - the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.
Jonathan Stalling
#3. The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon - as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there - like pebbles cooled in a river.
Naomi Wood
#4. Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
Elena Ferrante
#5. There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.
Nancy Kress
#8. A lot of young writers are very precious about their words. Don't be - you've got to be ready to burn stuff. You're not as good as you think you are, at least not yet.
Josh Lieb
#9. We were on stage. We were supposed to speak our dialogues. But at times, a smile says more than words ever can!
Avijeet Das
#10. A witer's mind is NEVER silent. It is always conducting the next symphony of words.
Leslie Austin
#11. I use "perpetrated" because it's the kind of word that passive-voice writers are fond of. They prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words - which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous. Short is better than long. Of the 701 words in
William Zinsser
#12. For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Teju Cole
#13. Careful writers and discerning readers delight in the profusion of words in the English lexicon, no two of which are exact synonyms. Many words convey subtle shades of meaning,
Steven Pinker
#14. A 21st century poet is a woman who can speak her mind and stand upright like a mountain with her convictions, but can adapt like water in an ever changing season without losing her genuine elements.
Roseville Nidea
#15. all the words
all the poems
know
my warm, soft spots.
Sanober Khan
#16. As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.
Sharon Shinn
#17. Wait a minute, words in the prompter, script on my desk, vending machine upstairs out of Funyuns ... the writers are back!
Jon Stewart
#18. Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Alberto Manguel
#19. There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.
Rex Stout
#20. And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.
Natalie Goldberg
#22. I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.
Donald McKay
#23. Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike
#24. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.
Anne Tyler
#26. If we are the trees, words are our roots; and we grow as we write
Munia Khan
#27. A lot of writers, because they don't understand actors, feel like, in order to be better at their performance, they have to change the words around a lot.
Giovanni Ribisi
#28. I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate words that ring true.
Elizabeth Winder
#29. Earth is a heaven but man often creates many hells within this heaven and a fascist country is one of the hottest and the most suffocating hell amongst all those hells!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#30. Art symbolizes our perfect ability in the matter of enriching the reality!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#31. We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles.
Sherwood Anderson
#32. I fight evil, and words are my weapons of choice.
A.D. Posey
#33. A lot of the time writers are just sponges ... for what's around them, and so books are helpful for focusing your mind and literally putting it into words.
Marcus Mumford
#34. What makes revolutionary thought unique is its clarity and dignity, and its clear grasp of freedom and justice: simple, clear words that are understood without the need for any help from elite writers or thinkers.
Nawal El Saadawi
#35. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers resonate most.
Rebecca Solnit
#36. At the end of all spiritual paths, there lies only a cold graveyard; the path of science is the only path that may give you something better than this!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#37. Writing is the high alchemy of the soul that combines words and ideas to create magic.
Sharif Khan
#38. What I take from writers I like is their economy - the ability to use language to very effective ends. The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical.
Mos Def
#39. You can never be a giant if you do not challenge the powers much more powerful than you!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#40. Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.
Steven Pinker
#41. When you find yourself writing, reading, or listening the delivery of words when spoken? You know the melody of wordplay. "& I love Wordplay
Elijah Cainaan
#42. Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.
Naveed Saleh
#43. For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.
Betsy Byars
#44. I'm not one of those actors who likes to analyze things too much, so I trust what the writers are doing with the characters, in order to give them their journey. My job is to come in and try to make those words on the page come alive on camera.
John Barrowman
#45. I waited for the seasons of love to pass from this cold winter to the summer heat I dreamed of.
Shannon L. Alder
#46. People are perfectly capable of ruining their own lives by very themselves without taking any wrong guidance from outside!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#47. Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters ... Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature.
David James Duncan
#48. Pick up any newspaper in the morning. Count the words in the lead sentences. There will be at least 25 in all of them: Guaranteed. The writers just want to tell you how many degrees they have from this college or that university.
Jimmy Breslin
#49. Writers would hate me saying this, and I love words, but I have to say that cinema exists, on one level, for the power of the big image and what that image does.
Miranda Otto
#50. Vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe,
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. Younger writers are always looking for "blurbs," one of the few words that sounds exactly as awful as the crime it's describing.
Brian K. Vaughan
#52. But every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.
Betsy Lerner
#53. He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.
Coco J. Ginger
#54. Poetry keeps me
in a highly drunken state
of divinity.
Sanober Khan
#55. We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.
Anne Lamott
#56. The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.
Sahara Sanders
#57. Solitude is not a port to drop anchor, but only a port to rest for a while!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#58. Countries which are governed by the dabblers will undoubtedly turn into the miserable countries!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#59. Reading is like magic--I think I've made my case. Without the gift of words, this world's a crazy place!
Denise Walter McConduit
#60. If you are earning your money through violence, all this money is unethical, because violence and ethics cannot be together!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#61. Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.
Beverly Cleary
#62. My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
Henry Louis Gates
#63. Writing barely differs from Talking and Reading. It appoints your hand while they engage your mouth and eyes respectively. The trio need the mind to combine sensible words from a meaningful arrangement of the 'simple' A B C to Z.
Olaotan Fawehinmi
#64. There are few words in the music business or in art that I'll say people or some writers are overgenerous with words like 'legend' or 'genius', 'he's a pioneer' and all of that.
Stanley Clarke
#65. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
King Samuel Benson
#66. And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.
PJ Harvey
#67. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#68. A good reader has the power to move the world.
Aman Jassal
#69. A poet's words are like mortar to the bricks of society.
Jason E. Hodges
#70. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.
A.E. Samaan
#71. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#72. 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
#73. Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.
Erin McKean
#74. 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.
#75. We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.
Garrison Keillor
#76. Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
Cornelia Funke
#77. Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feeling using a minimum of words-I think of Emily Dickinson -to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today.
Therese Anne Fowler
#78. The more the words of others impressed him with their factual content, the more he felt he must wait for his own facts before being tempted into words.
Louis Zukofsky
#79. Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It's an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.
Jason E. Hodges
#81. There are two excellent challengers against darkness in this universe: Powerful lights and great ideas!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#82. A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you.
John Steinbeck
#83. Don't let yourself be amazed by the imagination of a writer and his words, writers are almost all the time in a love-hate relationship with words.
Nema Al-Araby
#84. 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
#85. Writers need faith, or else we can never trust the action of our words!
Leslie Austin
#86. A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
Ernest Hemingway,
#87. The power of classical music turns my words into fire.
A.D. Posey
#88. Human communication and literature are all made of words; thus, it's hard to overestimate their unbelievable power.
Sahara Sanders
#89. 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
#90. Solitude is the path to visit yourself, it is the path to yourself!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#91. I was a poet. I had no expectations other than creating a world of art with words that would live on long after I was gone.
Jason E. Hodges
#92. Love is the only emotion so unexplainable and unique, that not even the greatest of writers could hope to contain it within their meagre words.
Ross Turner
#93. Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. "If the water is dark," goes a German aphorism, "the lake must be deep." Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.
Paul J. Silvia
#94. The choosing among words is made by every user of the language, and not exclusively by professional speakers and writers.
Wilson Follett
#95. To use a big word or a foreign word when a small one and a familiar one will answer the same purpose, is a sign of ignorance. Great scholars and writers and polite speakers use simple words.
Joseph Devlin
#96. If people want to be better writers, they can't just read the blogs! You've got to look at something that's outside this rushing world of evanescent words.
Camille Paglia
#97. Writing isn't necessarily a gift it is a passion. You can write a one page masterpiece to 99 pages of crap. What keeps you coming back is that Zen moment when you enlightened your own self with a few cleverly arranged words and saved yourself a $200 trip to the shrink, by simply buying a #2 pencil.
Shannon L. Alder
#98. Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
William Zinsser
#99. Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
Paul Kane
#100. I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.
Lisa Edelstein
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