Writers Quotes

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

~ Dr. Seuss

Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense?

~ Rudy Francisco

I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.

~ Walter Farley

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker, they need it to take the edge off.

~ Kellie Elmore

Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.

~ Jennifer Echols

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

~ John Geddes

Writing isn’t necessarily a gift it is a passion. You can write a one page masterpiece to 99 pages of crap. What keeps you coming back is that Zen moment when you enlightened your own self with a few cleverly arranged words and saved yourself a $200 trip to the shrink, by simply buying a #2 pencil.

~ Shannon L. Alder

To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on your feet and show the world how you survived it each time.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.

~ Philip Athans

Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.

~ L.l. Barkat

...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...

~ John Geddes

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.

~ L.l. Barkat

Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream.

~ L.l. Barkat

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

~ Brad Leithauser

She meant you have to live a story for a time.''And?''And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?''Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.''Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.

~ L.l. Barkat

In that moment, Dan was reminded why he wanted to write in the first place. It was the same reason anybody does anything -- to impress women.(Jeremy Goodwin, Sports Night)

~ Aaron Sorkin

Writers, even unpublished writers, have a tendency not to notice what’s going on around them when they are the center of attention.

~ Gary Reilly

One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back.“Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned.“Writing for me,” Megan had typed.“I’ll write you a tea fortune.”“No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

~ L.l. Barkat

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley’s personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical—the way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery.

~ L.l. Barkat

Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die—if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.

~ L.l. Barkat

I live within my daydreams and nightmares; through that, I have learned to create, and I never cease from doing so.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn’t it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. “She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit.

~ L.l. Barkat

Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?

~ Félix J. Palma

In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.So I would suggest that any attempted seduction of a writer would probably go a great deal easier for all parties if you sent them a cheerful note saying YOU ARE INVITED TO A SEDUCTION: Please come to dinner on Friday Night, Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in.And alcohol may help, too. Or kissing. Many writers figure out that they're being seduced or flirted with if someone is actually kissing them.

~ Neil Gaiman

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

~ Ian Mcewan

We writers are resilient souls.

~ Lauren Destefano

Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.

~ Harlan Ellison

I don't know why anyone would be scared of a homeless person. The truly scary people are all the murder mystery writers. They spend all day thinking of the perfect plot on how to kill someone and get away with it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.

~ Malcolm Cowley

I am a writer, I'm supposed to be intense and emotional

~ Natasha Duncan-Drake

You may be a serious writer if ….10. your hard drive is littered with random notes and story ideas … but not nearly as littered as your head.9. you keep pen and paper next to your bed. And in the glove compartment. And in your gym bag. Also on the rim of the bathtub.8. a day without Roget’s Thesaurus is a day without sunshine.7. your emotional landscape includes creativity, confidence, elation, frustration, and the occasional neurosis.6. you’ve ever had to clean peanut butter and bread crumbs off your keyboard, because the work was going well, and you didn’t want to stop for lunch.5. grammar and punctuation turn you on.4. your interest in a new acquaintance is directly proportionate to his/her potential as a secondary character.3. you’ve worn the white e, r, s, and t clean off your keyboard.2. the search history on your web browser would raise red flags with the FBI, CIA, DEA, and mental health professionals everywhere.1. you have stories to tell, and you just. Keep. Telling. Them.

~ Kathy Disanto

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.

~ Richard Hugo

I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

~ Angeline M. Bishop

Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

~ Philip Roth

I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

~ Angeline M. Bishop

Some writers may never create a work. Their purpose is to help others create their first word.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

What about his style? asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...What was he like as a person? asked Dalgliesh.Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity.A typical writer, in fact? suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

~ P.d. James

Falling in love with a writer is a dangerous thing, isn't it? The only thing you get out of it sometimes is immortality.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

~ Michelle Geaney