Top 100 Writers Write Quotes
#1. 'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.
Terrence McNally
#2. Nobody thinks mystery writers go around killing people, but they always seem to assume singers are singing about themselves, especially if you write melancholy songs like me.
Del Shannon
#3. You can curse the darkness, or you can dispel it.
A.D. Posey
#4. 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
#6. Accept nothing. Challenge everything.
A.D. Posey
#7. [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
#9. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.
Christy Hall
#10. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
#11. 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
#12. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#13. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.
Christy Hall
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#19. You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be.
A.D. Posey
#20. 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
#22. It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.
Kristen Lamb
#23. I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.
Tom Stoppard
#24. Don't look.
See.
Don't think.
Feel.
Don't hear.
Listen.
Pay attention
Miracles really do happen every day
A.D. Posey
#25. I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.
Anita Diament
#26. Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom.
A.D. Posey
#27. If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#28. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
Hanya Yanagihara
#29. I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.
Jonathan Galassi
#30. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
George Orwell
#31. We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.
Jane Yolen
#32. Don't let society's defined genre hold you down, be a free spirit and just write, let society be the one to decide where each piece fits in.
Uma Nnenna
#33. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
Octavia Butler
#34. Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.
Robert Galbraith
#35. 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
#36. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.
Jane Austen
#39. Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.
Ray Bradbury
#40. 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
#42. Live whatever draws out the magic within.
A.D. Posey
#43. Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
H.L. Mencken
#44. Like most writers, I read deeply into the genre in which I write.
Jonathan Maberry
#45. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.
Julia Stiles
#46. If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.
Jamaica Kincaid
#47. I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.
Patrick Ness
#48. I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.
Ken Kesey
#49. 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
#50. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
Gustave Flaubert
#52. 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
#53. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#54. 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
#55. When your heart is open, your eyes see the beauty that is all around you.
A.D. Posey
#56. People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
Cheryl Strayed
#57. I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.
Ann Brashares
#58. It's always more than just a story.
A.D. Posey
#59. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
#60. I write because I always want good to win over evil
Anamika Mishra
#61. All writers are readers first, and all of us write the sort of books we want to read.
George R R Martin
#62. Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.
Christy Hall
#63. It's amazing what you can do when you get creative.
A.D. Posey
#64. Your life should reflect your heart.
A.D. Posey
#65. I ended up at fifty, over-the-hill, thinking I had no future. Finally, I realized that I had allowed myself to write less than I could ... As writers true to ourselves, it will always be hard, and if we're good, we'll always be in trouble. Let's be sure we deserve it.
Waldo Salt
#66. Love is the key to everything. Love your life.
A.D. Posey
#67. Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.
Sigourney Weaver
#68. There is no time for holding back.
A.D. Posey
#69. ...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
#71. Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.
Deb Caletti
#72. Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#73. You ought to stop everything and write the sacred-words as its flashes in your mind.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#74. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
Louis Menand
#75. 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
#76. A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere
even in prison.
Louis Auchincloss
#77. You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.
M.J. Rose
#79. I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.
Ted Chiang
#80. Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either.
Aminatta Forna
#81. Capitol Records were very keen for me to write and see how I got on; I think that is what defined my sound. The first session I had was with two young up-and-coming writers, Nick Atkinson and Tom Wilding, and I went into a session a bit nervous because I hadn't written that many songs before.
Shane Filan
#83. I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
Jamaica Kincaid
#84. You can't undo the past, but you can remedy it by creating a better future.
A.D. Posey
#85. Here's the bottom line; writers write. Sometimes words flow easily. Sometimes it's like sloughing through mud. Either way a professional writer keeps writing.
P.C. Cast
#86. Us writers all like each other and want to write stories with each other; we're having a good time.
Charles Soule
#87. Creativity is magic in the making.
A.D. Posey
#88. You will need seed money, so begin saving for your book. Don't give up. Also, write down the ideas that you have right away so you don't lose them.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. Take a deep breath. Inhale peace. Exhale happiness.
A.D. Posey
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
Justin Cronin
#96. Your writers write these pieces about meaningless startups, meaningless apps and meaningless companies.
Nick Denton
#97. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.
Chevy Stevens
#98. I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day.
Christopher Bollen
#100. Storytelling answers questions and solves mysteries.
A.D. Posey
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
