Writers Quotes

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

From the writer's perspective, audience is always an act of the imagination. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books. ~ China Mieville

I'm interested in what the virtues of all those things are, especially for the kind of person who's made their own world that revolves around them, like writers do. It seems especially precious. ~ Miranda July

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage. ~ Salman Rushdie

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care. ~ Russell Banks

As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night. ~ John Gardner

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White's strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other's domain. ~ Christopher Bram

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing. ~ Teju Cole

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer. ~ Bob Schieffer

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up. ~ George R R Martin

I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know; they just don't have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize. ~ Danny Strong

I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both. ~ Jane Yolen

Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek. ~ China Mieville

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. ~ Susan Hill

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea. ~ Richard Ford

There is a group of entrepreneurs pushing the envelope, government officials that are making significant changes despite the odds, and visionary writers, academics, and colleagues whose work confirms, amplifies, and stretches my own thinking. ~ Robin Chase

When you work on a book and you have planned everything out and you are putting flesh to an idea and a surmise that before was mainly bones something funny happens. Your brain goes into an altered state where the words you write are not quite the words you want but rather the words dictated by the task at hand. ~ David Amerland

There's a perilous word fiction writers need to watch out for. The word is 'had.' ~ James Scott Bell

The music lets me see the story but the story doesn't let me write the words. ~ Elizabeth J. Kolodziej

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it. ~ Carla H. Krueger

I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up. ~ Richard Elman

There are probably many, many people who are better writers than me. ~ Nicolle Wallace

Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share. ~ Patricia Hickman

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent. ~ Marguerite Young

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write. ~ Norman Mailer

Writers like to believe they're in control of their material, but that's just a comforting lie. After more than twenty-five years of making my life as storyteller, it's become extremely -sometimes painfully- clear to me that I'm just a vehicle, a way for the story to get out into the world. But it's the story itself that does the telling. ~ J.M. DeMatteis

Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree"). ~ John McWhorter

In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant. ~ Tim Cahill

An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be. ~ Maggie Smith

If you are going to be on TV for however many years, you want to make sure that you have writers that are giving you something to work with, and I got that in spades. ~ Michael Shannon

Why would anyone pay for writing anymore when there's Facebook and why would anyone pay for music anymore when there's YouTube. ~ Lisa Bedrick

You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher. ~ Susan Barker

There are writers out there who say they're writing a second series, and then you pick it up and it feels exactly the same, only the lead character is blonde instead of brunette. ~ Alafair Burke

Comedians are people who embarrass themselves in style. ~ A.D. Posey

A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in straitjackets are thin on the ground - or no one tells them to me, anyway - but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under 'breakdowns' in the index of A Tragic Honesty. ~ Nick Hornby

Librarians and romance writers accomplish one mission better than anyone, including English teachers: we create readers for life - and what could be more fulfilling than that? ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual. ~ Karen Kingsbury

A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requires a leap of faith. The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else, trusting that the feelings will be delivered, and that the recipient will understand the writer's intent. How childish to think that could be easy. ~ Adriana Trigiani

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

We are writers, my love. We don't cry; we bleed on paper. ~ A.Y.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund's goal is to produce a broad range of investigative journalism created by both staff reporters and freelance writers, with a focus on working with the many experienced reporters and writers impacted by the economic contraction. The pieces will range from long-form investigations to short breaking news stories and will be presented in a variety of media - including text, audio, and video. ~ Arianna Huffington

A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do. ~ Susan Hill

The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

In Jason Fried's book Rework, he writes that one of the smartest investments a business can make is in hiring great writers, and I completely agree. No ~ Sophia Amoruso

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley ~ Nicholas Murray

People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments. ~ Victor Hugo

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit. ~ Richard Flanagan

There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head.

So many dudes I've dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize
and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.)

They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I "get them" more than anyone they've ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks.

None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can't cure.

They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about.

Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice.

They don't want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real.

So they invite me over when they're going through writer's block but don't answer m ~ Lora Mathis

Why would a lazy guy become a parent of five? Then again, why would creative people who inherently don't like change and criticism become writers, actors, or comedians? There's something about this process. I joke about it: My kids have made me a better person, and I only need, like, 34 more of them to be a really good guy. ~ Jim Gaffigan

I understand that each one of us works at a different speed, and has a slightly different process. I understand that these writers are painstaking, wanting each sentence-each word-to carry weight ... I know it's not laziness, but respect for the work, and I understand from my own work that haste makes waste. But I also understand that life is short, and that in the end, none of us is prolific. The creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn't produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell. ~ Stephen King

The Greeks, at least by the fourth century BC, knew Britain as Albion. Originally applied to a Spanish tribe called the 'Albiones', the term was later adopted for Britain, perhaps because of its similarity to the Greek word for whiteness, alphos, thanks to the white chalk cliffs of the southeast coast. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, says that Britain had 'previously' been called Albion, so by then the name must have fallen out of common use.2 By the time Britain began to be referred to more frequently, the Greeks called it Prettannia, or Brettannia.3 What does seem certain is that in the fourth century BC, Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles) sailed to Britain. Pytheas wrote down his experiences, but these only survive as incidental third-hand references by later writers. Most ~ Guy De La Bedoyere

But I also know he'll probably be a more complex characters because of some of the things I've just gone through. Isn't that what writers are supposed to do? Gather life experience so that they can channel them and create great art?" -Graham ~ Sarvenaz Tash

Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That's progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers. ~ Odysseus Elytis

We can't worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer. ~ David Cronenberg

The power of the delete key. ~ Buffy Andrews

The really successful work in England tends to be working-class writers telling working-class stories. The film industry has been slow to wake up to that, for a variety of reasons. It still shocks me how few films are written or made in England about working-class life, given that those are the people who go to movies. ~ Stephen Daldry

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that. ~ Stephen King

I first heard the term "meta-novel" at a writer's conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The idea is that even though each book in a series stands alone, when read collectively they form one big ongoing novel about the main character. Each book represents its own arc: in book one of the series we meet the character and establish a meta-goal that will carry him through further books, in book two that meta-goal is tested, in book three - you get the picture. ~ Carolyn Wheat

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers. ~ Margaret Cavendish

In order to make room for more of God in our life, we need to let go of things that are currently filling our heart and reorder the things that are not ordered properly in Him. The importance of an appropriate detachment from the things of the world-or as they sometimes speak of it, the putting of our lives into the right-is stressed by all the spiritual writers. ~ Ralph Martin

But most good writers are Don Quixote at heart, and unreasonableness is often a condition of art. ~ Ha Jin

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile. It looks beautiful, but soulless. So I warn them that, often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say . . . And you say, "It's so well-written, but who gives a fuck?" For certain, the guy who wrote it doesn't give a fuck. It's not something that has to do with his life; it's just something well-written and illuminating, and writing is not about that. The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about . . .

Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws. Why do we have to keep playing this strange game? ~ Etgar Keret

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. ~ Harlan Ellison

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Writing isn't about creating perfect characters. There's no such thing. It's about creating characters that are real; flawed
yet beautiful, in that they know they need another person. Needing someone else doesn't make them weak; if they believed all they needed was them self, they would be. A strong heroine isn't afraid to admit that a best friend, or soul mate, is exactly what they need at one moment or another. A strong heroine never stands alone. They stand tall; they believe in who they are. They are perfect in every human flaw, because as humans we are flawed. And in every flaw, I see the perfection of their souls. Writers breath life into simple words and create beings
flaws and all. ~ Cassandra Giovanni

I am not one of those writers that it just flows out of effortlessly. I have to sit and write and rewrite and sometimes it's really challenging to get anything good out of myself. ~ Princess Superstar

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction. ~ Alan Lightman

I can sit in the room with the other writers and just keep saying no until there's something I really like or until I come up with something. In that respect the proportion of what's mine and what's other people's is controlled by me. It isn't even fair to talk about. ~ Paul Reubens

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way. ~ Haruki Murakami

Love doesn't make you a poet; it makes you poetry. ~ Yarro Rai

Since many things we see were once an idea, let us create good ideas today because they will be the realities of tomorrow! When you create an idea, do not forget that you shape the future! Idea is your God side! With ideas, you can change the universe, but only with very great ideas! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I've wanted to direct for a long time, but it had to be a story I wanted to tell. The writer's job is to find the story that he should tell. ~ Peter Hedges

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. ~ James A. Michener

If you enjoy knocking self-publishing writers, write something better first, then, knock on! ~ Robert Scott

Great books can be ruined by bad writers. ~ Travis Simmons

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. ~ Julian Barnes

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers - not all of whom are modern ... I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this - becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn't mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you're just never the same. ~ David Foster Wallace

It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway. ~ George Murray

Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed. ~ Anna Freud

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making. ~ Walter De La Mare

And yet one did not find in the speech of Bergotte a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written phrase the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves. ~ Marcel Proust

It's plain to see that the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we're literary Gypsies, all of us, and it's only recently that we're starting to realise we're not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the wild people and mystics, the writers and painters, and the ones who are slightly cracked.

I've always loved wild people. ~ Karl Wiggins

The writer's curse is that the more you fall in love with the work you're doing, the more I think it shows. ~ Greg Rucka

Writing is like breathing for my soul. ~ A.D. Posey

One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers - anyone who wants to work in the business. Your voice counts. Your vision matters. ~ Melissa Silverstein

In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds. ~ Mandy Patinkin

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions. ~ Salman Rushdie

Writers must be fair and remember even bad guys (most of them, anyway) see themselves as good - they are the heroes of their own lives. Giving them a fair chance as characters can create some interesting shades of gray - and shades of gray are also a part of life. ~ Stephen King

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good. ~ David Foster Wallace

Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system. ~ Haruki Murakami

Writing 'Schottenfreude' has reinforced the fact that there are few, if any, emotions that have not been experienced, and analyzed, by some of the world's greatest writers. ~ Ben Schott

Memorizing the writer's handbook doesn't make you a writer. It makes you a specialist, and it puts you to a class with people who were given the same training. You all share the same view from the same room. ~ Keith Buckley

The first time I remember women reacting to me was when we were filming Hud in Texas. Women were literally trying to climb through the transoms at the motel where I stayed. At first, it's flattering to the ego. At first. Then you realize that they're mixing me up with the roles I play - characters created by writers who have nothing to do with who I am. ~ Paul Newman

A good many established writers seem to have the feeling that some day they are going to be found out, revealed as frauds. ~ Patricia Wentworth

This is apparently a little promotional ¶ where we're supposed to explain "how and why we came to" the subject of our GD series book (the stuff in quotations is the editor's words). The overall idea is to humanize the series and make the books and their subjects seem warmer and more accessible. So that people will be more apt to buy the books. I'm pretty sure this is how it works. The obvious objection to such promotional ¶s is that, if the books are any good at all, then the writers' interest and investment in their subjects will be so resoundingly obvious in the texts themselves that these little pseudo-intimate Why I Cared Enough About Transfinite Math and Where It Came From to Spend a Year Writing a Book About It blurblets are unnecessary; whereas, if the books aren't any good, it's hard to see how my telling somebody that as a child I used to cook up what amounted to simplistic versions of Zeno's Dichotomy and ruminate on them until I literally made myself sick, or that I once almost flunked a basic calc course and have seethed with dislike for conventional higher-math education ever since, or that the ontology and grammar of abstractions have always struck me as one of the most breathtaking problems in human consciousness - how any such stuff will help. The logic of this objection seems airtight to me. In fact, the only way the objection doesn't apply is if these ¶s are really nothing more than disguised ad copy, in which case I don't see why anyone reading them should ~ David Foster Wallace

Real writers write. Period. No, the muse does not come to visit everyday. She's a lazy, precocious flirt. You cannot get into the habit of being "in the mood" to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write. They get the words on the page. Period.
So stop waiting for your muse. Trust me, she sleeps around. ~ Darynda Jones

But it's clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It's amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don't want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don't want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now. ~ Junot Diaz

I admire writers who can remain objective and distanced, but that doesn't seem to be in my toolbox, somehow. ~ Gail Simone