Writers Quotes

...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

~ David Rakoff

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

~ W.h. Auden

If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.

~ Jamie Anne Royce

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

~ Roman Payne

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

~ Amy Bloom

It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

~ Seeley James

Never give up, Never surrender!!!!!If you think you can't, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins

~ Paula V. Hardin

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.

~ Dorothea Brande

I'm against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I'd almost prefer the word 'craftsman'. He's like one of those old-fashioned ship builders who conceived the build of the boat in their mind and after that touched every single piece that went into the boat.

~ William Golding

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

~ Colson Whitehead

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

~ Lawrence Block

Writer's block is caused by forcing your will on the Divine.

~ Chriscinthia Blount

I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life.

~ Ariel Gore

I am Orafoura, but you can call me Jarod Kintz. I’m fairly proud to proclaim that Dora J. Arod has me on her short list of “World’s worst writers.” The list couldn’t get any shorter, because I’m the only name on it. I should tell her to stop calling it a list, and change the title to “World’s worst writer.” If you’re wondering why I rate all my work one star, it’s because the rating system doesn’t have a zero star option, or better yet, go into negative numbers.

~ Orafoura

I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

~ Nancy Banks-Smith

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody but one whom nobody can imitate.

~ François-René De Chateaubriand

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

~ Barbara G. Harris

Begin with another's to end with your own.

~ Baltasar Gracián

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.

~ Henry Herbert

Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

~ Samuel Johnson

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

~ Henry Kissinger

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

~ William Stafford

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

~ William Stafford

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

~ Charles Darwin

In Ireland a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.

~ Anonymous

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

~ W. H. Auden

Make'em laugh make 'em cry make 'em wait.

~ Charles Reade

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

~ George Meredith

No tears and the writer no tears and the reader.

~ Robert Frost

The pen is mightier than the sword.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st James 2nd and the Old Pretender.

~ Philip Guedalla

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.

~ C. C. Colton

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

~ Oscar Wilde

Thought flies and words go on foot.

~ Julien Green

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

~ Albert Camus

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

~ Logan Pearsall Smith