Top 100 Writers On Writing Quotes
#1. How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here.
Donald Murray
#2. It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.
Robertson Davies
#3. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#4. 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
#5. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#6. I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.
Buffy Andrews
#7. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.
Christy Hall
#8. 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
#9. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#10. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.
Christy Hall
#11. It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.
Paul McCartney
#12. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#15. You are lovelier than all the roses in the world.
Avijeet Das
#16. Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.
Julia Cameron
#17. 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
#18. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#19. We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.
Jane Yolen
#21. Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.
Rachel Thompson
#23. And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by.
Avijeet Das
#24. 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
#25. Last night I weaved dreams from the cobwebs of time!
Avijeet Das
#26. 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
#27. I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us.
Buffy Andrews
#28. The mist after rain, uninterrupted rainfall on rooftops, pitter-patter intellect. The thoughts I leave behind like footsteps.
Chris Campanioni
#29. Imagination is the real magic that exists in this world. Look inwards, to see outwards. And capture it in writing.
Fennel Hudson
#30. 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
#31. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
Carla H. Krueger
#33. 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
#34. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#35. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
Ray Bradbury
#36. A pen that has clocked up a million words, a lifetime's memories, is worth more than the centrepiece in a jeweller's window.
Fennel Hudson
#37. Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
Brian A. McBride
#38. Before there were books, we read each other.
Lisa Cron
#39. You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K. Chesterton
#40. I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
#41. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#42. The night is the balm for the wounded souls of the world.
Avijeet Das
#43. ...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
#44. Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.
Sherry Thomas
#45. If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.
Jim Rash
#46. Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#47. 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
#49. The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
#50. 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
#51. Reflective writing produces distinct rewards. A writer does not claim to live exclusively in the moment. A pensive writer retreats into oneself in noble attempt to meld memory, thought, faith, doubt, and other strong emotions into thought capsules while exploring the inscrutable web of creation.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#52. A poet's words are like mortar to the bricks of society.
Jason E. Hodges
#53. There is only one person who needs to be convinced that you're a writer. That would be you.
Tim Campbell
#54. The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal
#55. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#56. Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head.
Christy Hall
#57. The more of those little light bulbs that can turn on the better. Eventually you'll have enough to light up a movie screen.
A.D. Posey
#58. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
Frederick Lenz
#59. An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer?
Jason Lutes
#60. When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.
Alvi Syahrin
#61. 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
#62. The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.
Katherine Paterson
#63. Storytelling is a gift, but writing is a learned art.
Beem Weeks
#65. I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world.
Kay Kenyon
#66. Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.
Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.
Mary O'Hara
#67. 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
#68. The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one's mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.
Fennel Hudson
#69. Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don't let stress steal your joy.
Sarra Cannon
#70. 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
#72. I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.
Christy Hall
#73. Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing.
Gil Gerard
#74. I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.
Jack Jordan
#75. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#76. The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple - to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.
Craig Raine
#77. We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.
Alan Brennert
#78. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni
#80. 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
#81. You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.
Paul Simon
#82. I am happiest sitting against a tree, with my notebook or sketchpad on my knee, capturing the moment.
Fennel Hudson
#83. Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.
Rich Sommer
#84. Magic : when you create something from the materials around you to astound and make the audience say "Wow." Magic happens on mundane days. It happens when you least expect it. It brings a spark to our drab and monotonous days.
Avijeet Das
#85. Things that only a writer would understand - you're writing a character - you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.
Lisa Marbly-Warir
#86. 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
#87. I consider whoever my words land on to be my target, that's why I like flash fiction, it's a lot like using a shotgun.
Neil Leckman
#88. 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
#89. I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.
William Zinsser
#90. A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.
Richard Wright
#91. Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
Sherman Alexie
#92. ...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#93. Inspiration for what we produce comes from reading, observing the world of humans around us and also the animal kingdom
Walt Disney Company
#94. Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#95. I never understood, what a starving artist was until I became one.
Mary Sage Nguyen
#96. When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.
Sam Shepard
#97. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#99. Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.
Nora Ephron
#100. Your eyes make me pick up my pen and write.
Avijeet Das
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