Writer Quotes

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

~ Sara Sheridan

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?

~ Gian-Carlo Rota

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

~ George Orwell

Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.

~ Sara Sheridan

The greatest tribute one can give to a writer is that it is simply enough to read him.

~ Isaac Goldberg

I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.

~ Sara Sheridan

Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

People who label erotica writers as sluts/men-whores remind me of the mob that once condemned smart women as witches. Mankind has not evolved much.

~ Anna Bayes

The first task of every author is to evoke emotion in their reader. You may laugh or you may cry; you may love me or you may hate me. So long as you feel something, I know that I'm doing my job.

~ V.l. Dreyer

My writing, it’s my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always have the urge to write. 

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City...

~ Christy Hall

What I really want is to be recognized as a writer; that someday, my poetry — this is an interesting paradox — would be taught in English classes; for my name, along with my poetry, to exist 500 years from now.

~ Harley King

Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.

~ Ace Antonio Hall

I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.

~ Christy Hall

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

~ Christy Hall

Writers get to construct a magical world that readers can visit in thought and extend their stay with imagination.

~ Sandra Alex

I write because if I don’t let it out of my system, I will die with guilt.

~ Shahla Khan

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

~ Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.

~ Julia Child

A bad handwriting is as annoying to a reader … as an irritating voice is to a listener.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Why I write music? Because it hurts not to.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?

~ David Morrell

I’ve long considered becoming a writer to be the death of nightmares. For me at least, since I started writing I hadn’t had any. Something really terrible or awful happens in a dream and you wake up and think, awesome, and reach for a pen and paper.

~ Logan Kain

You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer! Miss Frost said. It's not a career choice.

~ John Irving

Words both written and read are my passion.

~ Leslie Austin

I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.

~ Steven Pressfield

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

~ George Orwell

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

~ Margaret Atwood

I never said you were supposed to be a jailer, i only said a normal person would have questioned why someone would create a decoy nun and then crawl out the window.

~ Janette Rallison

You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

~ Don Roff

The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.

~ Steven Pressfield

The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.

~ William Saroyan

Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.

~ Patti Digh

I write because I have to, because I wouldn't know what to do with my hands if I didn't.

~ Angeline Trevena

The trouble with a baby, for writists, is that they take away your useful melancholy, even the energy to invent some.

~ D.a. Botta

For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something...then yeah, they're old enough. LOL

~ Michelle M. Pillow

I've never yet run out of ideas what to write about... only out of time to write it in.

~ Rayne Hall

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

~ David Mitchell

Sometimes we dream of things that we've always wanted--of things that we have been searching for our whole lives without knowing it...and other times we wake up and know what we have to do. I have to write...so I do.

~ Cassandra Giovanni