Writers Quotes

How become a writer? Naturally.

~ Edward Abbey

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant.

~ Mary Lascelles

I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.

~ Sebastian Horsley

NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the Earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink is the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands.

~ Xavier Forneret

The fat man looked amused. What on earth for? he said. I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.

~ Lavie Tidhar

The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

~ Flannery O'connor

A writer learns that easy to read is hard to write ...

~ C.j. Heck

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.

~ Betsy Lerner

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.

~ Gore Vidal

Writers are born, not created.

~ Tim Campbell

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.

~ Jaron Lanier

Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.

~ Stephen Jones

It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.

~ Parnell Hall

Do you write every day?' 'Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don't work very hard, really. Really I'm on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.' He'd said all this before, to others; he wondered if he'd said it to her. 'It's like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn't ever a time you absolutely had to do it - there was always Saturday, then Sunday - but then there wasn't ever a time when it wasn't there to do, too.''How awful.' (Novelty)

~ John Crowley

It must take a lot of self-discipline,' she said.'Oh, I don't know. I don't have much.' He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that 'Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter - if you write one page a day, you'll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.''I don't know,' she said, laughing. 'I can't even bring myself to write a letter.''Oh, now that's hard.'(Novelty)

~ John Crowley

Professional writers write to fit

~ Pamela Glass Kelly

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

~ Dean Wesley Smith

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

~ Ray Bradbury

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

~ Barbara Pym

Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” (p.136)

~ Mark David Gerson

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most

~ Eudora Welty

[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.

~ Edward Abbey

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

~ Alan Ayckbourn

Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.

~ Emma Thompson

Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus.

~ David Bowker

You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party

~ William Saroyan

Writers were a strange sort, I knew that much from the newspapers.

~ Chris Priestley

Many writers were better before they became famous.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

What are they like, writers, in your mind: it may seem strange, but initially it’s not about writing. A writer is someone who struggles with the angels of solitude and truth. A confused struggle, without any clear conclusion.

~ Christian Bobin

5.57am and I’m finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn’t get much easier.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz

~ Kevin Ansbro

…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

But I loved those books or at least that first one. And I felt somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must be there. That you couldn't write such beautiful things and have such an ugly heart. But that is the truth. He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

You are a writer when your overwhelming need to tell a story outweighs your fear of ridicule.

~ Julie Rodelli

Fruition-Think of writing as a harvest.You till the ground.Plant.Water.Wait.Apple trees take years to bear fruit.Harvest.Clean.Process.Then you have apple pie.

~ Keelie Breanna

I am grateful for the white sheet - all my stories are his.

~ Mladen Đorđević

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.

~ Iris Murdoch

All writers are exiles: some by circumstance, some by choice.

~ Marty Rubin

There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Names do not write poems nor do they create work.

~ Dejan Stojanovic