Writers Quotes

I write because I know I am only one to control the world I created in my books.

~ Anamika Mishra

A writer can never escape the labyrinth of words inside his mind.

~ K.d. Green

You will always find me writing and reading as long as I have the breath of life within me.

~ K.d. Green

If you want to write, write. It’s as simple as that.

~ K.d. Green

I know having a job can sometimes be very challenging, but not having one can be too.

~ Chris Mentillo

The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.

~ Oliver Markus

The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.

~ Lafcadio Hearn

Writing is the high alchemy of the soul that combines words and ideas to create magic.

~ Sharif Khan

...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.

~ Stephen King

The most important step in the whole process was to just sit down and do it. My hobby has become a second career. Who knew?-Jamie Beck, Romance Novelist

~ Holly Hurd

Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.

~ Elena Ferrante

Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great.

~ Bryan Way

Within my words there is a longingTo be written, through the senses to travel across the mindTo be perceived by your heart, to rest in your deep.

~ Preeth Nambiar

I don’t see big subjects as separate from little ones. Yes, you could trudge through life with great human tragedies played out before your eyes without ever taking notice. Or you could see a universe in the smallest thing. The way a person takes their coffee, for example, might say something profound and important about that person, about all humanity, about existence itself.

~ Johnny Rich

To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.

~ Johnny Rich

Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.

~ Johnny Rich

I was asked, ‘When is the next book release, it’s been over a year since the last book release, have you given up writing?” Again a senseless question by a Sri Lankan journalist. Does it mean that being a writer means you have to release a book every month? Do they count a writer’s success by the quantity of books or the quality of the work? I am concerned about the quality of work, not the quantity of books that I release. One can publish hundreds of books within a couple of years today as technology is advance and cheap, but keeping the quality of the work is something you cannot depend of technology and money. It is the quality of thinking of the writer which should reflect through their work. I have been in the field for almost 2 and a half years, learnt a lot through trial and error, learn through my mistakes. I am no longer bothered about the number of books I write, how much I spend or how much I earn, my only focus is to do something quality which will last long, even after I am gone, something that will touch the soul of the readers. Will these journalists understand a soul of an artist? In this big dirty game of ‘media mafia’, ‘artists’ are only marketing ideas.

~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

Writers should be heard, not seen.

~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

I write because in my books, I can experience those (mad and crazy) things that I won't be able to do in my real life

~ Anamika Mishra

By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal of external life otherwise than as you see it.

~ Olive Schreiner

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.

~ Lorraine Hansberry

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . .

~ Elena Ferrante

Where do you get your ideas?' people are always asking authors they admire, which I’ve always thought was another way of asking, 'How did you get my ideas, which I didn’t know I had until you put words to them?' We are known, appreciated, even cherished by our favorite writers; every word of our favorite books seems to have been written for us. Within their sentences and paragraphs, those writers are forever available, forever patient, including us in their compassionate recognition of the impossible, exhausting complexity of being human (those “many thousand” selves), never ignoring us or abandoning us or finding us dull. It’s you, they whisper, as we turn their pages, you are the one I’ve been waiting to tell everything to.

~ Suzanne Berne

Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.

~ Hanif Kureishi

Writers live twice.

~ —Natalie Goldberg

We, writers & poets, have a big problem. We swim too deep inside life, also in shallow waters, and then we end touching the sand!

~ Rossana Condoleo

Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Enjoy writers and entertainers but don't substitute their synthesis of truth and reality for your own. Seek your own counsel as much as you can. Dependence on any one or anything else will eventually result in disappointment and this may be, as it always was.

~ Nikhil Sharda

And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seedsfor the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.

~ Kristen Henderson

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

~ Sanober Khan

The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

~ John F. Kennedy

Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read, the living ones can use the money.

~ Thomas C. Foster

I soon forgot about my bedraggled appearance. Until, that is, an old man shuffled in and propped himself, hunched and wheezing, over the check-in desk. Karen asked him if he needed assistance. “No,” he grunted sucking on his teeth, “your wet-T-shirt librarian with the punk rock hair is helping me out just fine.

~ Suzanne Kelman

The muse is fickle; ergo, when she knocks, ANSWER! It may take a while, but trust me, she WILL knock. In the meantime, keep your ear pressed firmly to the door.

~ Quentin R. Bufogle

The ‘coons had enjoyed a real party, and my trashcan had been the piñata! They’d obviously indulged in an evening of feasting on our wares and then staggered off the property loaded up with our birdseed as a little take-home gift!

~ Suzanne Kelman

Writers are not narcissists. They simply acknowledge that what they find interesting is not unique to them.

~ M Chapman

Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on...

~ Matthew Pearl

If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

~ Leonora Carrington

Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desk for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it. Interviewers propose to speed up this process by trepanning writers, so to speak, and fishing around in their brains for unused ideas which otherwise might never get out of there. Not a single idea has ever been discovered by means of this brutal method-- and still the trepanning of authors goes on every day.I now refuse all those who wish to take the top off my skull yet again. The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.