Writer Woes Quotes

They always tell you to do what you love. But they forget to add that writing doesn't pay by the hour. ~ Joyce Rachelle

To all my librarian friends, champions of books, true magicians in the House of Life. Without you, this writer would be lost in the Dust. ~ Rick Riordan

A writer is never alone; he is always in conversation with himself ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

There seems little or no hope for the adult writer who produces sentences like these: "Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time." The phrase "Her cheeks were thick and smooth" is normal English, but "[Her cheeks] held a healthy natural red color" is elevated, pseudo-poetic. The word "held" faintly hints at personification of "cheeks," and "healthy natural red color" is clunky, stilted, slightly bookish. The second sentence contains similar mistakes. The diction level of "extended to the intersection of her lips" is high and formal, in ferocious conflict with the end of the sentence, which plunges to the colloquial "most of the time. ~ John Gardner

Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.' ~ Tom Paulin

The 7 Practices of Exceptional Student Athletes is an excellent book for student athletes to understand what it takes to be successful. It covers all phases of life, and it is filled with wonderful wisdom. Illustrated by brilliant examples of very successful people, The 7 Practices of Exceptional Student Athletes forces student athletes to use their common sense as they work to achieve their goals. Raven Magwood is a very talented person and an extremely gifted writer. ~ Danny Ford

Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious upheavals of the 1680s, and the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism opposed to more modern trends. He was Poet Laureate from 1668, but lost this position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II. Dryden had become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex issues of religion and politics in an attempt to reconcile bitterly opposed factions. This contains a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century later: 'By education most have been misled … / And thus the child imposes on the man'. The poem shows an awareness of change as one grows older, and the impossibility of holding one view for a lifetime:

My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Followed false lights…

After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-comedy, and comedy, as well as with adaptations of Shakespeare.
......
Dryden was an innovator, leading the move from heroic couplets to blank verse in drama, and at the centre of the intellectual debates of the Augustan age. He experimented with verse forms throughout his writing life until Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) ~ Ronald Carter

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it. ~ Leo Rosten

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. ~ John Banville

Bill Gates is said to be Aspergian. Musician Glenn Gould is said to have been Aspergian, along with scientist Albert Einstein, actor Dan Aykroyd, writer Isaac Asimov, and movie director Alfred Hitchcock. As adults, none of those people would be described as disabled, but they were certainly eccentric and different. ~ John Elder Robison

Just being a writer allows one the maturity to have random conversations with random strangers! ~ Avijeet Das

I think every writer lives for the thought that there will be a moment when somebody reads something on the page and says, "Yes!" ~ Marianne Williamson

I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop. ~ Rosemary Mahoney

In my early thirties I was working in television as a researcher. I was really stuck for a period of five years. I got to TV when I was thirty. I hated being a music writer, and kept wondering why I couldn't be doing the exciting things that my friends were doing in television. ~ Mary Harron

I tend to write, either myself, or I sometimes write with a co-writer, my friend that lives up the road. It's usually a relatively solitary thing, but I do like coming up with ideas. ~ Colin Hay

Every day one has to earn the name of 'writer' over again, with much wrestling. ~ Sylvia Plath

These letters, and then words, and then sentences, that are written on your manuscript are all answers to questions. Writing is nothing but a long journey of confronting questions. Accomplishment will bring you peace, but will not make a writer of you. ~ Rabisankar Bal

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about. ~ Sharon Delarose

It's insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are. As a writer, who I'm friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like - it's totally not important to the work. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

The first five years as a writer, I didn't know how to write at all. I couldn't write my way out of a white paper bag. And yet, I did some remarkable things. And later on, there were periods where I got this mission to find an articulate voice with rewrites and all. There were periods where I was as dense as Faulkner. ~ Richard Meltzer

When members of the London Poetry Society asked Browning to interpret a particularly difficult passage of Sordello, he read it twice, frowned, then admitted, "When I wrote that, God and I knew what I meant, but now God alone knows."
Rather than risk sounding dense, readers, colleagues, and critics who can't figure out what a writer is trying to say but think it sounds intelligent will typically resort to calling such work "daring," "provocative," or "complex." An unholy alliance of writers and readers is at work here. ~ Ralph Keyes

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for. ~ Flannery O'Connor

A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination. ~ Jesse Ventura

A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal.
-The Carrie Diaries pg. 337 ~ Candace Bushnell

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

Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game! ~ Rashers Tierney

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of one's language were the limits of one's world. By coming up with fresh and arresting words to describe the world accurately, the writer expands the boundaries of her world, and possibly her readers' world, too. Real writing can do what R. P. Blackmur said it could: add to the stock of available reality. There ~ Mark Edmundson

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels. ~ P.J. Harvey

Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

You want to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you'll be really straight with them at all times. ~ Michael Pollan

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciae of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day. ~ Isaac D'Israeli

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it. ~ Karl Marx

I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing. ~ Alistair MacLean

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry. ~ Charles Darwin

By instinct I'm an adventurer; by choice I'd like to be a writer; by pure, unadulterated luck, I'm an actor. ~ Errol Flynn

The writer's is an interior world, a world of the mind. ~ Vikas Swarup

The greatest act of self-education I've ever undertaken has been to become a writer. ~ Mark Rubinstein

Everyone to me has to pick a subject to talk about in music if you're going to be a writer. ~ Barry White

You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that. ~ Saul Bellow

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer. ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.' ~ John Henrik Clarke

What The Story Grid offers is a way for you, the writer, to evaluate whether or not your Story is working at the level of a publishable professional. If it is, The Story Grid will make it even better. If it isn't, The Story Grid will show you where and why it isn't working - and how to fix what's broken. ~ Shawn Coyne

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said. ~ William, Saroyan

I like writing that puts the needle right into the vein. I don't think, when I'm writing, "Tell a good story" or "find a meaning." I'm thinking phrase by phrase, make it tight, make it good. Get the idea out in language I can bear. I think there's something musical about being impatient with boring sentences - it's not that I don't have boring sentences, God knows I do, but I'm impatient with them. ~ Maggie Nelson

As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author. ~ Victoria Hanley

Because of television, sports columnists have become personalities. I went to a party [during Super Bowl week] and there must have been 500 people who wanted to talk to me because they saw me on TV. I've become sort of the Soupy Sales character on TV, and people do not really know me as a writer. ~ Woody Paige

Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer. ~ William S. Burroughs

I'm an actor and a writer, that's how I think of myself. Sometimes my time is divided equally, sometimes less equally, but that's what I do. ~ Mark Gatiss