Writers Quotes

Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.

~ William Faulkner

It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.

~ Charles Bukowski

1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one — fame or delight.5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.6. Cunning and excess are your friends.7. TV and liquor are your enemies.8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.9. You’re done when the crows sing.

~ Ron Dakron

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

~ Edward Albee

Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

~ Neil Gaiman

The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.

~ Hilaire Belloc

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

~ Alberto Manguel

I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial

~ Said Anne

We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.

~ Boria Sax

A writer fails, not when a reader is not moved; but when, as a reader, the writer is not moved.

~ Gerard De Marigny

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.

~ William Saroyan

The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.

~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Writers are nothing more than borderline schizophrenics who are able to control the voices.

~ Jennifer Salaiz

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

~ David Foster Wallace

It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.

~ Jo Walton

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

~ Nelson Algren

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

~ W.h. Auden

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.

~ Helene Hanff

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Hope is a most beautiful drug.

~ Jeremy Mercer

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specific

~ Jaclyn Moriarty

The relationship between a perfect cup of coffee and a writer is just like the couple who always standby and feel proud of being committed to each other.

~ Himmilicious

Color me....BRILLIANT.

~ Coco J. Ginger

Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation.

~ Patrick Dennis

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

~ Haniel Long

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

~ Dan Brown

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.

~ Raymond Chandler

You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.

~ Robert J. Randisi

This is the nature of love. Vashet said. To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

...she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.

~ Ilsa J. Bick

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

~ Edward Abbey

He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.

~ Anne Lamott

He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.

~ César Aira

I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.

~ Dean Wesley Smith

So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.

~ Stephen King

A kind of losing loadum is their game,Where the worst writer has the greatest fame.

~ John Wilmot

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.

~ Roy Blount Jr.

An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell

~ Tim Lucas