Storybook Writer Quotes

Every exceptional writer holds a Master of Arts in Daydreaming. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize
it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do. ~ Stanislaw Lem

I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated. ~ Tayari Jones

When I was really young, I wanted to grow up and be the sun. Which shows an early penchant for ambition or narcissism or grandiosity or delusion - all of which are bellwethers for becoming a writer. ~ Gayle Forman

No one would have the courage to walk up to a writer and ask to look at the last few pages of his manuscript, but they feel perfectly comfortable staring over an artist's shoulder while he is trying to paint. ~ Robert Genn

We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

You don't get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, We are shaped and fashioned by what we love. ~ Austin Kleon

My aunt and my mother read to me when I was three from all the old Grimm fairy tales, Andersen fairy tales, and then all the Oz books as I was growing up ... So by the time when I was ten or eleven, I was just full to the brim with these, and the Greek myths, and the Roman myths. And then, of course, I went to Sunday school, and then you take in the Christian myths, which are all fascinating in their own way ... I guess I always tended to be a visual person, and myths are very visual, and I began to draw, and then I felt the urge to carry on these myths.
If I'm anything at all, I'm not really a science-fiction writer - I'm a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology. ~ Ray Bradbury

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

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

As a writer, it's important to stay true to your story without giving a hoot about publishers, critics and readers. You should do your karma as an author the way you want to, and rest is up to God. ~ Amish Tripathi

Despite her apparent freedom, her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books. A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What nonsense!
The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin.
Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life, from one moment to the next. But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly. ~ Paulo Coelho

Writer platform is comparable to the listenership of a specific radio station or the viewership of a particular television program. ~ Shawna Morey

My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing ... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about. ~ Thomas Mallon

It has often been said
there's so much to be read,
you never can cram
all those words in your head.
So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.
That's why my belief is
the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh
of the reader's relief is.
And that's why your books
have such power and strength.
You publish with shorth!
(Shorth is better than length.) ~ Dr. Seuss

Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don't. Who knows, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to. ~ Alan W. Watts

It does seem, in other words, not only more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a woman writer (which corresponds to the male situation of experimental writer vs. writer), but also peculiarly more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a male experimental writer. She may, if young, get caught up in a "movement," like Djuna Barnes, like H.D., like Laura Riding, as someone's mistress, and then be forgotten, or if old, she maybe "admitted" into a group, under a label, but never quite as seriously considered as the men in that group. ~ Christine Brooke-Rose

You don't need to be a poet, a performer, a writer, or a journalist to tell your story powerfully. You do, however, need to elevate your language in ways that will bring your story to life clearly and imaginatively for others. ~ John Capecci And Timothy Cage

Interference is a terrific page-turner, but it's also a haunting, powerful look at the way families and friendships entangle us all. Berry is a sharp-eyed, engaging writer, and she deftly captures the terrors, ruptures and intimacies of one seemingly ordinary neighborhood, always finding a precarious beauty in her characters' lives. This is a book that is terrifying, startling, and very hard to put down. ~ Rebecca Godfrey

Quite often, too, a writer who has for a time been believed to possess a great store of ordinarily profound ideas, and who is expected to exercise an extraordinary and serious influence in the progress of society, in the end betrays such shallowness and insipidity of his fundamental idea that no one is sorry when he succeeds in writing himself out too soon. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels. ~ Wilbur Smith

I didn't come in as a writer that found producers, I came in under producers. So I've always respected the actual production process and producers in general. ~ Pusha T

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager. ~ Paulo Coelho

To achieve works of meaning, a writer (or any artist) must cut into himself and leave his soul on the canvas, exposed for anyone to do with what they please. Reject it. Spit on it. Swallow it whole. Whatever. It is done. ~ Mardra Sikora

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. ~ Susan Sontag

A good writer wants from us - or has no right to ask more than - intelligence, good faith and time. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

The most important thing for any aspiring writer, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you're trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything. ~ George R R Martin

People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand
what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for
Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is. ~ Taylor Hackford

The combinatory agility of words," he wrote in "Not-Knowing," "the exponential generation of meaning once they're allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven't yet encountered. ~ Donald Barthelme

Makebelieve is a writer's best friend. ~ Solange Nicole

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is ... There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it ... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting. ~ Anthony Burgess

Seriously, I don't consider myself a writer. I don't think I have writing talent. But I will continue to do it. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels. ~ May Sarton

When I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics. (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? p. 103) ~ Jeanette Winterson

I'm a writer first and an editor second ... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command. ~ Lynn Abbey

The writer is a kind of hawk; he goes round in the skies, constantly looking with his sharp eyes for the character that he can pick up with his claws. Sometimes he goes round hungry for a week, he cannot catch any characters; and sometimes characters rain on him like heavy rain. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: "Know thyself". Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other. ~ Alan Moore

Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work. ~ Wendelin Van Draanen

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing. ~ Garrison Keillor