Great Writer Quotes

A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. ~ Gilles Deleuze

Every great writer is a great deceiver ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the "gift" of not belonging. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself. ~ Vincent Price

He was a big, rather clumsy man, with a substantial bay window that started in the middle of the chest. I should guess that he was less muscular than at first sight he looked. He had large staring blue eyes and a damp and pendulous lower lip. He didn't look in the least like an intellectual. Creative people of his abundant kind never do, of course, but all the talk of Rutherford looking like a farmer was unperceptive nonsense. His was really the kind of face and physique that often goes with great weight of character and gifts. It could easily have been the soma of a great writer. As he talked to his companions in the streets, his voice was three times as loud as any of theirs, and his accent was bizarre…. It was part of his nature that, stupendous as his work was, he should consider it 10 per cent more so. It was also part of his nature that, quite without acting, he should behave constantly as though he were 10 per cent larger than life. Worldly success? He loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world...But there was that mysterious diffidence behind it all. He hated the faintest suspicion of being patronized, even when he was a world figure.

Archbishop Lang was once tactless enough to suggest that he supposed a famous scientist had no time for reading. Rutherford immediately felt that he was being regarded as an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month's reading. Then, half innocently, half malevol ~ C.P. Snow

In Europe, I'm recognized on the street sometimes. And that's cool, because I don't have to live there and deal with it every day. Unless you're Stephen King - a great writer, by the way, and anyone who says different knows nothing about the craft - you're more likely to be recognized in America if you play in a soap opera than if you're a novelist. ~ George Pelecanos

It doesn't take five novels to become a great writer ... it takes one novel rewritten five different times. ~ B. Chancellor Burgweger

Hay he's a great writer and i like him a lot ~ Jeff Kinney

Be a great writer when you write your life's song. ~ Debasish Mridha

A great writer is a great writer ... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book. ~ Phil Klay

Beside every great writer is a great listener. ~ Nanette L. Avery

David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer. ~ Adam McKay

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and ... read.
But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you've become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes. ~ Chila Woychik

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to. ~ Tom Bissell

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator. ~ Marcel Proust

You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties. ~ Rick Aster

I've known Shawn for several years. And he's just an amazing talent. He's a great writer, a marvelous, marvelous guitar player, and plays really good fiddle. ~ Guy Clark

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2. ~ Susan Sontag

Lizzy Weiss is such a great writer, and she really writes for the performances. ~ Vanessa Marano

To the Red Drum for sets, to hear Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos - not a challenging look but the king and founder of the bop generation at least the sound of it in digging his audience digging the eyes, the secret eyes him-watching, as he just pursed his lips and let great lungs and immortal fingers work, ~ Jack Kerouac

Truthfully, I guess I would like to be remembered as a great writer and a kind person. I wouldn't mind if an expensive bag were named after me, like Jane Birkin. ~ Mindy Kaling

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are. ~ Gore Vidal

As a writer, all you want to do is write for great actors. That's all. ~ Amy Sherman-Palladino

while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one. I ~ Stephen King

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book ... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist. ~ Anthony Burgess

A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape. ~ Andre Maurois

You become a great writer by writing. ~ Peter Thiel

Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word incarnadine belongs to multitudinous seas. ~ Virginia Woolf

Somewhat overly legibly, I wrote on a sheet of paper, "We're held up indefinitely by the parade. We're going to find a phone and have a cold drink somewhere. Will you join us?" I folded the paper once, then handed it to the Matron of Honor, who opened it, read it, and then handed it to the tiny old man. He read it, grinning, and then looked at me and wagged his head up and down several times vehemently. I thought for an instant that this was the full and perfectly eloquent extent of his reply, but he suddenly motioned to me with his hand, and I gathered that he wanted me to pass him my pad and pencil, I did so- without looking over at the Matron of Honor, from whom great waves of impatience were rising. The old man adjusted the pad and pencil on his lap with the greatest care, then sat for a moment, pencil poised, in obvious concentration, his grin diminished only a very trifle. Then the pencil began, very unsteadily, to move. An "i" was dotted. And then both pad and pencil were returned personally to me, with a marvellously cordial extra added wag of the head. He had written, in letters that had not quite jelled yet, the single word "Delighted." The Matron of Honor, reading over my shoulder, gave a sound faintly like a snort, but I quickly looked over at the great writer and tried to show by my expression that all of us in the car knew a poem when we saw one, and were grateful.

На едно листче - някак прекалено четливо - написах: „Парадът ще ни задържи неопреде ~ J.D. Salinger

Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru said. ~ Haruki Murakami

Don't be discouraged if you think you're not a great writer because terrible writers are successful in Hollywood ~ David Seltzer

Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write. ~ Dolph Lundgren

I don't consider myself a great writer, but I would like to think that I can at least proof- read. ~ Aimee Mann

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government, ~ Mark Bowden

Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you. ~ Barack Obama

The school board banned one of Maya Angelou's books, so the librarian had to take down her poster.

I fished it out of the trash.

She must be a great writer if the school board is scared of her. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to. ~ Lawrence Clark Powell

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself. ~ Martin Cruz Smith

The great writers are great as they have big workshop of imagination. ~ Kishore Bansal

The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

Being a good observer is a great tool to have as a writer, just taking the world in. ~ Lauren Conrad

Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus) ~ Martijn Benders

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one. ~ Julianna Baggott

I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers. ~ Frank Harris

The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one ~ Stephen King

At difficult times of my life, books have been an incredible comfort. When I was 12, I changed schools and my parents split up. It was then that I became addicted to reading. A great writer can attach themselves to your mind and heart, and you feel you understand the world better. As long as you have the capacity to read, you needn't be alone any more. I remember thinking as a child, "If I could give one person the comfort I keep getting from books, then I want to write." ~ Elliot Perlman

Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ... ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy. ~ Irwin Shaw

The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both. ~ August Wilson

The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer. ~ Julie Powell

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer ... if he can only ... tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes. ~ Clive Barnes

I know I'm not a great writer. I'm an extremely gifted oral communicator, but when it comes to writing, I'm just a beginner. ~ Marianne Williamson

On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years. We've just lost a great writer in Antonin Scalia. ~ Dahlia Lithwick

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

She writes in a very elegant way , always knows what to say and how to approach someone; she is very caring ... ~ Imran Shaikh

Surely, then, mere style, or language, never was, as it never could, naturally, it never could, possibly be praised, by well-informed readers; by them, the poet's manner of expressing his ideas is admired, only as the vigorous, and splendid nature of those ideas give it a dignity, and lustre. A style deserves no commendation which is not impregnated with the spirit of genius; if it is not actuated, and burnished with that spirit, it must always be feeble, and lifeless, like its weak, and presumptuous authour. Infinitely various are the powers, and display of the human mind: sometimes a nervous, nay, a great writer, in his ardent intellectual progress, will be negligent of the style, or manner in which he expresses his thoughts; but still, aided by that ardour, even his negligent strokes will hit you; even in his roughness you will feel an interest. This is another proof, if another proof was wanting, that it is thought which gives a commanding character, and authority to style; and that style will attract, and fix, and gratify our attention; even when it is thrown out by a careless vigour. ~ Percival Stockdale

When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation. ~ Jude Law

Before climbing the summits, you must first walk in the down valleys! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Listen to the Bee Gees and you can learn to be a great writer. ~ Kara DioGuardi

He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer. ~ Simon Callow

My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool. ~ Drake

To be a great actor you just need to comprehend, so that's why I became a writer. ~ Johnathon Schaech

You mentioned that Palermo, the part of Buenos Aires where you were brought up, had been a violent place full of bohemians and bandits. There they had two names for the knife, 'the blade' and 'the slicer'. The two names described the same object, but 'the blade' was the thing itself, and 'the slicer' described its function. 'The blade' could fit in the hand even of a sickly child shut up in his father's library, 'the blade' could be any of the superannuated daggers and swords belonging to his warrior grandfather or great-grandfather and displayed on the walls of his house, but 'the slicer', the knife in the hand slicing back and forth, in and out, existed only in his imagination, in a fascinating world of rapid settlings of accounts and duels over honor, an insult or a woman, in dark street where you never went, where no writer went, except in the literature he wrote.

'I've always felt that in order to be a great writer, one should have the experience of life at sea, which is why Conrad and Melville and, in a way, Stevenson, who ended his days in the South Seas, were better than all of us, Vogelstein. At sea, a writer flees from the minor demons and faces only the definitive ones. A character in Conrad says that he has a horror of ports because, in port, ships rot and men go to the devil. He meant the devils of domesticity and incoherence, the small devils of terra firma. But I think that having experience of "the slicer" would give a writer the same sensation as g ~ Luis Fernando Verissimo

He was so good at everything he did. You can't call Ronnie Barker a comedian. He was an actor, and a great writer. ~ Bruce Forsyth

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul. ~ Havelock Ellis

Everyone has access to a pen and paper, but to be a great writer is difficult. ~ Pamela Yates

A great writer is a blitzed illusionist of portable magic. You're welcome. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?' ~ Dax Shepard

As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy. ~ David Cross

I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else's theories, in literary types - in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!" Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said: "Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature. ~ Anton Chekhov

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview] ~ Ray Bradbury

As actors, we were fighting that tooth and nail because of fear, because language is a crutch and dialogue is a crutch, and it's so easy to just have a great writer write you a line. ~ Charlize Theron

Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up. ~ Donald Miller

The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. ~ Henry Miller

I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. ~ Terry Pratchett

Soon after my husband and I started living together, he learned to make noise before coming into my writing space. He learned to do this because if he didn't I would get startled and scream. That would startle him and he would scream. It was 'Night of the Living Dead' meets Edvard Munch till we worked things out.
When I write, especially when the writing takes off, I fall into a trancelike state in which I dream with my eyes open. This is why I write. It is the opium I crave, this entry into another state of consciousness. I used to think it meant I was a great writer, that it was proof of my 'genius.' I also used to think it meant I was a nut who zapped into hallucination as soon as her husband shut the door – 'Diary of a Mad Housewife' with computer. I now realize it merely means I am writing. ~ Marcia Golub

The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. ~ Bill Gates

I never tried to ingratiate myself with great writers. When a great writer has nothing to say, he does something else, like chopping firewood. A great writer doesn't try to find something to write about, he only writes when he has to. I was no great writer. I've always had the need to unload my thoughts, and so had to live with a kind of mental incontinence, but I've never felt forced to write a novel. Nor, for that matter, have I ever chopped firewood. ~ Jostein Gaarder

As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors. ~ Judith Thurman

An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming. ~ Alain De Botton

We made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving. ~ Marcel Proust

I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something. ~ Gene Weingarten

To be a great writer, you must be nomadic. I'd recommend the hunter/gatherer lifestyle for anybody serious about being nonsensical. ~ Jarod Kintz

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. ~ Victor LaValle

In the words of a great writer, we find our own neglected thoughts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation. ~ Richard Powers

I'm not a great writer. I'm a great rewriter. ~ Paddy Chayefsky

Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer. ~ Tucker Max

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it. ~ Jean Rostand

I'm not on the run from anything and I'm not at all clear about what I'm running towards. But as some great writer put it, I want to be certain that when I arrive at death, I'm totally exhausted. ~ Fiona Shaw

He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him ... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

When I look back at it, I'm mostly amazed at how poorly it was shot. David Kelley is a great writer, and I thought the scripts were great, but it just looks so cheap. ~ Peter Berg

To be a great writer you must be fearless with your words. ~ Karmel Graham

Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru ~ Haruki Murakami

I'm not a great writer. ~ E.L. James

Jesse Joyce is a great writer. ~ Dave Attell

When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer have perished. ~ Theodore Roosevelt