Quotes about writer
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“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

“Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks-- admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.”

Henry Miller book Sexus

Source: Sexus

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Life

“The purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible.”

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) author, activist, professor

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Life

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

People

“Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Lie, Reading

“I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.”

Joanna Russ book How to Suppress Women's Writing

Source: How to Suppress Women's Writing

Health, Personality

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Imagination, Time

“Science Fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

Knowledge, Science

“I don't think we have a future. I know we do. I want to marry you and have kids and be a stay-at-home writer dad while you take Boston journalism by storm. I want to wake up beside you every day for the rest of my life.”

Shannon Stacey (1972) american writer

Source: Exclusively Yours

Life, Home, Thinking, Future

“God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

God, Faith, Art

“The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.”

Carter G. Woodson book The Mis-Education of the Negro

Source: The Mis-Education of the Negro

History, Understanding

“If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day… You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning…”

Walter Mosley (1952) American writer

Forgetting

“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 (1942) American radio host and writer

"Post to the Host" (July 2005) http://www.publicradio.org/columns/prairiehome/posthost/2005/07/ <br class="br">Context: Journalism is a good place for any writer to start — the retailing of fact is always a useful trade and can it help you learn to appreciate the declarative sentence. 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.

“I'm a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

“In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

Source: Places I Never Meant To Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers

Books, Age, Fear, Silence

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Way, Sense

“When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Reading

“He was a writer and words were his weapons.”

Christopher Moore book Bloodsucking Fiends

Source: Bloodsucking Fiends

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Death, Confidence, Chance, Self-confidence

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Communication

“A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.”

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990) Swiss author and dramatist

Problem

“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets… when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.”

John O'Hara (1905–1970) American journalist

Women, Men, Understanding

“Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.”

Jonathan Franzen (1959) novelist

Imagination

“If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.”

Don DeLillo book The Names

Source: The Names (1982), Ch. 4

Love, Literature, Dead

“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"Looking Back on U.S.A.," New York Times, Oct 25 1959
Context: If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.

Hell

“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Faith, Thinking

“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

April 6, 1775
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

Books, Time, Reading, Parting

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Problem, Time

“Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get”

Colson Whitehead (1969) novelist

“Mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982)

Way, Thinking, Winter

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Tear

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal, New York Times (26 August 1981)

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

God

“A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world…”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

World, Heart

“One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Education, Feeling, Universe, Personality

“There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Thinking

“I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Guy, Time, Reading

“Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Ficciones

"The Secret Miracle"; Variant: Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
Source: Ficciones (1944)

“The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)

Time, Reading

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

People, Books

“Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Lunar Park

Source: Lunar Park

Way

“You're a writer. Make it up.”

David Benioff book City of Thieves

Source: City of Thieves

“It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

World

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Love, Dreams, Reading

“a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: The American Presidency

Truth

“If you need drugs to be a good writer, you're not a good writer.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

The Rod Serling bio page on the Internet Movie DataBase.
Other

“A writer should read until he is filled to the brim and like a pitcher which is over-filled over flows. And then he should write.”

Charles Nodier (1780–1844) French author

Reading

“All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.”

Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer

Heart

“Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

Women, Men, Country

“My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”

Elmore Leonard (1925–2013) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

Parting

“The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, wondering how many writers and philosophers had said this before her, the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.”

Barbara Pym book Less than Angels

Less than Angels (1955), chapter 9

Life, Pleasure, Sadness, Home

“Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?”

Richard Yates book Revolutionary Road

Source: Revolutionary Road

People

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next — one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.
Autobiographical Notes (1952)

World, Feeling

“When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 7

World

“Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 186)

Pain, Youth

“Realism can break a writer's heart.”

Salman Rushdie Shame

Source: Shame

Heart

“An old maxim says that a professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

A Gift of Wings (1974)
Source: https://books.google.de/books?id=InUpHgnif58C&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9&dq=An+old+maxim+says+that+a+professional+writer+is+an+amateur+who+didn%27t+quit&source=bl&ots=RpDceaKvsx&sig=ACfU3U0n2qLBUs3E_5CDTfLDvLPmk3tB7A&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB16L5_5jyAhWlgf0HHeQyD2oQ6AF6BAgREAM#v=onepage&q=An%20old%20maxim%20says%20that%20a%20professional%20writer%20is%20an%20amateur%20who%20didn't%20quit&f=false A Gift of Wings

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (4 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Life, Books, Parting