Quotes about writer

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“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“You're a writer. Make it up.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Realism can break a writer's heart.”

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

“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.”

“Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.”

“He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.”

“There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.”

“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”

“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”

“When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.”

“When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married.”

“A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.”

“I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.”

“young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.”

“She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.”

“a writer is a foreign country”

“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”

“Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.”

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.”

“We play at believing ourselves imortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.”

“I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn”

“Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't…. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

“Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.”

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.”

“I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.”

“Human females, they're kind of crazy during this time aren't they?

If you chose to believe the stories written by male writers.

They heard a bang and thump from the kitchen. Followed by Meg yelling at something.

That many males can't be wrong.”

“Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J. R. Ward”

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”

“I never could understand why some writers treat women as helpless. Every woman I know is strong in her own unique way.”

“Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

“I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.”

“Writers will happen in the best of families.”

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.”