Top 100 Writing Author Quotes
#1. Our lives are a novel being written. We are its author. Every action we encounter and every person we meet has a role and a place in our ultimate story. It is in our control to decide the level of how, who and what impacts us and how large a role we decide to assign each.
Mark W. Boyer
#2. When I sit down to write I actually ask myself, 'Who do you want to be today?'
Richelle E. Goodrich
#3. It's good to write badly. Things can only get better.
Alan Dapre
#4. Grayson: Fiction is just a lie anyway.
Brianna: But it's not - it's a different kind of truth - it would be your truth at the time of the writing, wouldn't it?
Nora Roberts
#5. Maybe I am just an old fool with foolish thoughts, but those foolish thoughts allow this old fool to sleep quite comfortably at night.
S.A. Tawks
#6. No matter what you write, no matter how meticulous and painstaking the creation process, someone is going to laugh, scorn, and dissect your work with criticism while another quietly falls in love with it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#7. In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author.
John Locke
#8. I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
#9. I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.
Paul Auster
#10. A quote is a story, suspended in a sentence and treasured through time.
Ryan Lilly
#11. I can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious.
James Thayer
#12. Keep writing and let the world roll on by.
Take the madness of reality and shape it into something worth sharing.
Peter James West
#13. The problem with being an author in this modern world is such: computers break often; books don't
Emma Iadanza
#14. Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.
William Strunk Jr.
#15. I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write.
Laini Taylor
#16. An author who rewrites his own work must essentially be two people. One is the free flowing uncritical writer who creates the bulk of the material - the other is the extremely critical editor whose aim it is to make the book as good as it can become.
Gudjon Bergmann
#17. Don't forget Who you are writing for. It's easy to get discouraged when people don't like your writing, but that's just it. They're people. You don't want to serve people, you want to serve God. Write for Him, and ignore what other people say. It just doesn't matter.
Ivy Rose
#18. Writing in the first person helps to make clear the author's role in constructing rather than discovering the story/knowledge.
Gayle Letherby
#19. To fight discouragement, remind yourself of the basics:
I can write.
I have the opportunity to do so.
I love what I write.
Now smile and be thankful.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#20. Blank pages are like monsters that haunt my dreams until I feed them words.
V.M. Sawh
#21. Writing is simply another means for truth to escape, besides crawling out the hole it's eaten in the author's belly.
Dianne Kozdrey Bunnell
#23. I write because I love it, not because I excel at it. But because I write, I shall slowly excel at it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#24. I've long considered becoming a writer to be the death of nightmares. For me at least, since I started writing I hadn't had any. Something really terrible or awful happens in a dream and you wake up and think, awesome, and reach for a pen and paper.
Logan Kain
#25. I write so others might contemplate things that are out of the ordinary. I write to make people feel - to cause laughter and tears and anger at injustice. I write so the world will imagine and wonder at crazy, incredible truths. I write to have a tiny bit of influence on a universal conscience.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#26. You can't lose sleep over should-of's and could-of's.
S.A. Tawks
#27. I do not write poetry; I take words and dip them in feelings.
Arti Honrao
#28. I'm an author. We don't want to lead. We don't need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people's heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don't. We never know. We just make stuff up.
Neil Gaiman
#29. I love writing, but I would be able to love it more if that love wasn't motivated by fear of homelessness.
Jenny Trout
#30. [On writing to Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple:] I told her I would play a Venetian blind, dirt on the floor, anything.
Whoopi Goldberg
#31. The power of fiction is a great thing. But, after all, reality is just a little more important.
S.A. Tawks
#32. One of the things I love about labeling myself as an author is that I can read books and call it "researching writing styles."
Mike Mankoff
Mike Mankoff
#33. I do not steal imagination. I use it and replace it by making people read.
S.A. Tawks
#34. No amount of therapy can replace the joy of revenge writing.
Mylo Carbia
#35. Let your words be your voice. And let your voice be heard within the hearts of others.
Anasia Nicole Hixon
#36. And now, I have another good reason to speed up my baby narratives to make my author's profile appear more respectable.
Armineonila M.
#37. There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#38. Write what you want to write and would like to read, not for any invisible audience. Your readers will find you.
David John Griffin
#39. I can't imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author's business to write, not talk.
Agatha Christie
#40. The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.
Anne Tyler
#41. I bleed words.
I dream in narrative.
I live in infinite worlds.
I befriend figmental characters.
I wish on stars in other galaxies.
I harvest stories from a brooding muse.
I bloom under moonlight in hushed seclusion.
I am a writer.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#42. The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive.
S.A. Tawks
#43. The first duty of an Author is
I conceive
a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities.
Charlotte Bronte
Juliet Barker
#44. We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Roland Barthes
#45. Your book goes places you may never go and helps people you may never meet
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#46. Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.
Sarah Zettel
#47. Ending a series is a difficult one ... where should a story that you have followed for so long end? When do you step away from the characters and let the readers decide their fate from there? When they can stand on their own is my only answer for that.
Shandy L. Kurth
#48. We must stop this unimaginable atrocity before it becomes a reality.
S.A. Tawks
#49. Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.
Maureen Johnson
#50. Nimzovitch became then for me more or less the author of the only book which could help me get away from these Euwe books, which, I admit, are very good for the ordinary club player. But once you've reached a certain strength you get the impression that everything that Euwe writes is a lie.
Bent Larsen
#51. And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.
Connie Willis
#52. When I write, I try to represent the voices of people I've known who had no voice.
Carla H. Krueger
#53. Through her eyes the day was new and anything was possible.
S.A. Tawks
#54. When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
Sherman Alexie
#55. Like a father with his daughter, the writist plays peek-a-boo with the world. His aim is to evoke that sweet smile, the one that says "i remember you. I am glad you are here again".
D.A. Botta
#56. To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Robertson Davies
#57. You are not the writer. You are the story being told from The Writer.
Richard Wisniewski
#58. A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
William Shenstone
#59. Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.
Samuel Johnson
#60. Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.
Robert Dugoni
#61. An author's strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher's commitment to it.
Sterling Lord
#62. I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?
Tawni O'Dell
#63. Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.
Ace Antonio Hall
#65. A story only wants to be told. Don't stand in its way.
Aleks Canard
#66. It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.
Charles Dickens
#67. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#68. Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..
Geoffrey Hill
#69. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
Jonathan Franzen
#70. Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them.
S.A. Tawks
#71. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#72. Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.
Ren Garcia
#73. The easiest emotions for an author to evoke from readers are boredom and confusion.
Raul Ramos Y Sanchez
#74. I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.
Wesley D. Gray
#75. You've got to have high expectations to achieve top results.
S.A. Tawks
#76. No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
Stephen King
#77. It is an awesome tragedy in this life that, when asking what a person is and they reply doctor or lawyer or engineer, we don't say Well thats a nice little hobby, but why don't you take up writing or painting or music?
D.A. Botta
#78. Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#79. To reach the pinnacle of your writings potential; productivity becomes obsolete.
Marston James
#80. I have high hopes for the book and have already made a down payment on a Ferrari. Well, it's actually a small metal model of a Ferrari, kind of like a Dinky Toy, but a little bit bigger.
Paul Benedetti
#81. He could've penned a rendition of Moby Dick in Pig Latin and he wouldn't have been the wiser.
Kelly Moran
#82. Writers need faith, or else we can never trust the action of our words!
Leslie Austin
#83. One shot is all anyone needs if they back themselves and do it right.
S.A. Tawks
#84. I'm an author whose strength is in gag-writing.
Jeff Kinney
#85. How do you crush spirit? You take out all the good.
S.A. Tawks
#86. Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#87. It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
Samuel Johnson
#88. An undaunted author, is the one who will succeed. There is no misfortune, that can dim their optimism.
Mary Sage Nguyen
#89. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
#90. Every author has some peculiarity in his descriptions or in his style of writing. Those who do not like him, magnify it, shrug up their shoulders, and exclaim there he is again!
Hans Christian Andersen
#91. When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write.
Carla H. Krueger
#92. I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.
Maureen Howard
#93. Shigure: G'morning.
Tohru: Good morning!
Yuki: Um, Shigure, it's night. Why don't you get a normal sleep pattern?
Shigure: I became an author so I wouldn't have to.
Natsuki Takaya
#94. Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social?
Michelle M. Pillow
#95. The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
Umberto Eco
#96. There's a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don't lead a story. You follow it.
Kate Inglis
#97. Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
Stephen Vizinczey
#98. I thought of To Kill a Mockingbird. I had finished reading it one night in a bunker, my knees bent and hunched together while mortars hit the ground, the glow of a cigarette and the moon as my only light. Standing there now, chain-smoking, I felt like I finally understood the ending.
Michael Anthony
#99. Bring on the controversy. I write real life. It's harsh and sometimes gritty, but it's real. Why should we tip toe around that?
Shandy L. Kurth
#100. To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.
Pat Conroy
