Top 100 Writers The Quotes
#1. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
Tim Cahill
#2. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo
#3. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Gertrude Stein
#4. But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.
Sean Hayes
#5. I know of three ways to recognize another writer: Writers are shamelessly nosy. Writers tell good stories, even about dumb old, daily things. On most writers, the earmarks of thrift, if not outright povery, are evident.
Joyce Thompson
#6. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
Ernest Hemingway,
#7. My dad was an adventurer, my mother a romantic. When they met in college, both were creative writers; the writing was a bond.
Brian Herbert
#8. There's something about the alchemy of the show - the actors, the writers, the directors, the editors - that makes 'Parenthood' unique. You get so deeply embedded with these characters because you go through life with them, and that's our priority.
Jason Katims
#9. This grant gave me more than memories; it gave me a crucial experience that is formative to all writers: the ability to perceive that we become writers in exile, where what we write is the only link across distance and time ... I became a Maryland writer because the community of Juneau took me in.
Paula Vogel
#10. I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.
Octavio Paz
#11. A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard
by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
Archibald MacLeish
#12. Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?
Richard Yates
#13. I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
#14. With some writers, the script looks beautiful on the page, but nobody actually speaks like that.
Neve McIntosh
#15. As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#16. It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.
Don DeLillo
#17. Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.
Lord Acton
#18. What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.
Ray Bradbury
#19. From that time forward it has been hard for me not to think of literature as created primarily to give writers the drinks they want.
Caroline Rody
#20. I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.
Grace Paley
#21. Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.
Joy Fielding
#22. I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers - the emotional storage is done very early on.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#23. There are all kinds of writers. The best writers write children's books.
Richard Scarry
#24. The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks ... And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.
Joseph Stalin
#25. You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Gore Vidal
#26. Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness.
Anne Lamott
#27. There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman
#28. I've got to be out doing a million things. That's how I find stories. That's how I get the relationships and get the projects that I get with the writers, the directors.
Dana Brunetti
#29. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. No, the fault lies with the artists," Claire went on. "The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king.
Diana Gabaldon
#31. In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.
Amity Gaige
#32. I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.
Regina Spektor
#33. I'd like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.
Terri Windling
#34. Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.
Langston Hughes
#35. If we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#36. There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.
Diane Duane
#37. 593
Still (very still), at the heart of "literary culture" is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.
David Shields
#38. Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
Amy Tan
#39. For many writers, the journal is their opportunity to be honest with them- selves - the greatest test of all.
Frank McCourt
#40. America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.
Martin Amis
#41. To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.
Per Petterson
#42. I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since then has just been repetition. A lot of it is marvelous but the forms haven't changed.
Pankaj Mishra
#43. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.
Dorothy Parker
#44. I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.
Julia Glass
#45. You can give your message to anybody, to everybody, from anywhere, from everywhere, in every way possible. The only thing you have to consider is this: Let your message be simple and understandable!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#46. There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.
Michael Anti
#47. But however imperfect, even repugnant, were particular policies, particular actions, there remained the purity of the ideal, represented in the theories of Karl Marx and the noble visions of many lesser thinkers and writers.
Howard Zinn
#49. 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
#50. I think one of the things the writers' festival does that is very good is that it brings writers from around the world and around the country and locally and puts them all in the one spot together, and that's what a lot of the world's great writers' festivals do.
Nick Earls
#51. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
Dinaw Mengestu
#52. ... unpacked her books, her sweet delight in happier days, and her soothing resource in the hours of moderate sorrow: but there were hours when even these failed of their effect; when the genius, the taste, the enthusiasm of the sublimest writers were felt no longer.
Ann Radcliffe
#53. You can curse the darkness, or you can dispel it.
A.D. Posey
#54. Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
Richard Price
#55. Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde
#56. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#57. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#58. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#59. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf
#60. As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing.
Elfriede Jelinek
#61. Do not reflect on the meaning of the word; thinking and reflecting must cease, as all mystical writers insist. Simply "sound" the word silently, letting go of all feelings and thoughts.
Willigis Jager
#62. This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.
Patrick Rothfuss
#63. It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.
Rachel Weisz
#64. After 'Nikki' and 'Steve Harvey,' I had written on a show called 'The Oblongs,' which was pretty well respected and had a lot of 'Simpsons' writers on it. So I was a TV writer with an interesting voice at that moment.
Jill Soloway
#65. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#66. The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
#67. See, what I don't like listening to is when writers go, 'And then the person cries.' 'Or the person does this.' It's there, but it's not the Bible. I wait and see what happens to me on the day.
Kim Coates
#68. Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.
Irwin Shaw
#69. I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.
Irwin Shaw
#70. 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
#71. Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.
Jane Hirshfield
#72. The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways.
Sandra Cisneros
#73. Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!
Terri Windling
#74. Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can't for long conceal the toxic spots on your character - Philip Larkin is Exhibit A - nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.
William Giraldi
#75. Style! style! why, all writers will tell you that it is the very thing which can least of all be changed. A man's style is nearly as much a part of him as his physiognomy, his figure, the throbbing of this pulse,
in short, as any part of his being is at least subjected to the action of the will.
Isaac D'Israeli
#76. There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.
Stephen Daldry
#77. The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.
Colin Wilson
#78. 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
#79. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.
John Scalzi
#80. Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
#81. Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.
Tom Bissell
#82. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
P.D. James
#83. The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'
Roger Ebert
#84. 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
#85. I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.
D.A. Botta
#86. I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
Gary Shteyngart
#87. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker
#88. We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.
Anais Nin
#89. One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.
Kathy Reichs
#90. So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us.
Natalie Goldberg
#91. Crafty writers ... don't allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#92. Some of the greatest writers in our industry can't get work.
Kent McCord
#93. So I made a request. I said to the writers, I have a minor request that I just want to play a loser.
Justin Long
#94. Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term.
Richard Whately
#95. 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
#96. The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#97. You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be.
A.D. Posey
#98. 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
#99. The writers are the stars of every really successful sitcom.
Betty White
#100. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire
