Writer Quotes

1. "I was a writer for 'New York' magazine. I had been to business school, but what did I know? Still, everybody from the receptionists on up to the editor would ask me what they should do with their money."
Author: Andrew Tobias

2. "The idea that you're not a writer until you're published is a lie."
Author: Andrew Vachss

3. "This is our goal as writers, I think: to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that catch us off-guard, that break in our small bordered worlds. When this happens everything feels more spacious."
Author: Anne Lamott

4. "Mystery writers' conventions are usually good, and this one has been excellent and extremely well prepared and thought out in advance. A lot of people have given their time and their skill, and a good deal of wit, and Anchorage has made us extraordinarily welcome."
Author: Anne Perry

5. "The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers."
Author: Barbara Walters

6. "I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside."
Author: Barry Mann

7. "I was always a writer - working on campaigns was never a profession for me. It was something I did on the side, really, so the trajectory hasn't been a political operative who likes to dabble in writing and finds himself into stumbling on film and TV - that was always my goal."
Author: Beau Willimon

8. "Communion was born out of shared frustration in 2006. We felt that although the likes of MySpace and YouTube opened up the playing field for songwriters online, people's discovery of these new artists was only skin deep."
Author: Ben Lovett

9. "For the writer who truly loves language, a trip to the copy editor is like a week at a spa. You come out looking younger, trimmer, and standing straighter."
Author: Betsy Lerner

10. "People think writers are always feeling inspired. That's only about 5% of it. 95% is the daily discipline to just sit and write."
Author: Bruce Van Horn

11. "I'm definitely a singer-songwriter. I'm somewhere in the vein between Elliott Smith and Jack Johnson."
Author: Bryan Greenberg

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

13. "As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not."
Author: Carl Van Vechten

14. "Writers gonna write."
Author: Cat Spydell

15. "There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote never was published and he didn't have enough the money to publish it himself, then he thought he was truly great. The truth, however, was there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter."
Author: Charles Bukowski

16. "I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it."
Author: Charles Kuralt

17. "Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

18. "The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience."
Author: Chinua Achebe

19. "I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up."
Author: David Mitchell

20. "The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century."
Author: E. L. Doctorow

21. "I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general."
Author: Eric Brown

22. "If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper."
Author: Eugène Ionesco

23. "As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic literature are, with a few exceptions, not out to convert, but to set down a narrative story endowed with the consistency and conviction of inner reality only during the time of the reading: a game, sometimes a highly serious game, with anxiety and fright, horror and terror."
Author: Franz Rottensteiner

24. "Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."
Author: Gaston Bachelard

25. "My art school rejection letter arrived as a cold manila fist that closed around my fragile hopes [...] The fear was practically edible. Nothing would happen unless I get out and make it happen.Then, as if handling me the keys to the jet pack, my dad bought me a typewriter and a taped message to the inside of its case: "Son- the world is waiting to hear from you"."
Author: Grant Morrison

26. "I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write."
Author: Gregory David Roberts

27. "If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. It must call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of conception and those of life. As elsewhere, experience is the only guide here; but as no one man's experience can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it."
Author: Herman Melville

28. "Foolish writers and readers are created for each other."
Author: Horace Walpole

29. "A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate."
Author: John Barton

30. "To use a big word or a foreign word when a small one and a familiar one will answer the same purpose, is a sign of ignorance. Great scholars and writers and polite speakers use simple words."
Author: Joseph Devlin

31. "Carole King is one of my all-time favorite songwriters."
Author: Judith Hill

32. "Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!"
Author: Larry Niven

33. "Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with."
Author: Louise Erdrich

34. "For hardly any of the ecclesiastical writers have handled the Divine Scriptures more ineptly and absurdly than Origen and Jerome."
Author: Martin Luther

35. "For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block."
Author: Mary Garden

36. "As if the night has been created for the writers and as if the silence of it is the very inspiration itself!"
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

37. "If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die."
Author: Mik Everett

38. "Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make."
Author: Norman Lear

39. "And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing."
Author: Octavia Butler

40. "Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing."
Author: Richard Ford

41. "It's well known that actors are lousy writers."
Author: Richard Grant

42. "Next week we have a bunch of horror writers coming from all over the world. That'll be one whole week, fully catered, and pre-paid bar. Those horror writers drink like fshes. Just their beer bill's gonna pay for the upkeep of this place for six months. Motel business is a great business to be in, my boy."
Author: Richard Laymon

43. "When you're a writer, you pull your life into your work. My first love is cinema. That's where I want to be judged."
Author: Roger Avary

44. "My writing voice is a little quirkier, more singer-songwriter-y than the Top 40 stuff I cover."
Author: Sam Tsui

45. "The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another."
Author: Stanisław Lem

46. "That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening."
Author: Taiye Selasi

47. "Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
Author: Thomas Burger

48. "An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn't have to--and indeed cannot--capture the hearts of every possible reader out there. No matter who the writer, his ideal intended audience is only a small faction of all the living readers. Name the most widely read authors you can think of--from Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens to Robert Waller, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling--and the immense majority of book-buyers out there actively decline to read them."
Author: Thomas McCormack

49. "If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

50. "It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon."
Author: Walker Percy

Writer Quotes Pictures