Writers Quotes

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.

~ Marcel Proust

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.

~ Matthew J. Bruccoli

If God didn't want me to cross boundaries, then he wouldn't have made me a writer.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.

~ Josephine Tey

Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.

~ Shay Youngblood

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof Ihope there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am notunderstood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profoundis couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentenceis printed in a different character shall be judged to contain somethingextraordinary either of wit or sublime.

~ Jonathan Swift

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.

~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

~ Ernst Pawel

I have this rage that I can't explain. It's sad.

~ Peter Davis

Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.

~ Eveli Acosta

all that really matters to me is that there are critics.

~ Peter Davis

New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.

~ Gillian Flynn

The only way to be inclined to write is to write to your inclination.

~ Terry Lander

I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

~ David Mitchell

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his Irises—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden

~ Kirk Douglas

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page, it takes place in your head.

~ Susan Orlean

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.

~ Anne Lamott

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.

~ Julie Wright

Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone on a beach. God made us this way so we would know where every lighthouse can be found and tell others how to find them. We were never meant to stand on the beach with you because every rescue we do rescues ourselves. We always go back to the sea because that is where driftwood belongs--forever searching for answers to our endless questions and sharing what we learned...(2012, Writer’s Conference)

~ Shannon L. Alder

I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced

~ Agatha Christie

Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don’t let stress steal your joy.

~ Sarra Cannon

It is so small secret that many writers are also alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, or habitual wearers of blue jeans (in some cases all of the above).

~ Arthur Graham

I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells; a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and often, when there is nothing in the world at the bottom, besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half under ground, it shall pass however for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.

~ Jonathan Swift

To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.

~ Pádraic Pearse

...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal

~ ;James M. Cain

...people quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression...

~ John Geddes

It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.

~ Cornell Woolrich

...bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius - not the display of talent...

~ John Geddes

If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.

~ Elaine Liner

...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...

~ John Geddes

...a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....

~ John Geddes

Words raced thru his mind and his fingers ached to capture them all on paper.

~ Eveli Acosta

People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.

~ Sara Levine

She had words in her heart which she released thru her fingertips.

~ Eveli Acosta

You connect yourself to the viewer by by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you.

~ Steven Brust

There is an audience for everything, our job as writers is to do the work and provide readers with a choice.

~ Elizabeth Hernandez

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a Times-Picayune book review.

~ Susan Larson