Writers Quotes

People visit exposed and vulnerable, writers live there

~ Alisa Hope Wagner

When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. — It is not fair. — He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. — I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it — but fear I must.

~ Jane Austen

Don't think too much. There'll be time to think later. Analysis won't help. You're chiseling now. You're passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There's something there. It isn't your business yet to know whether it's going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you've carved the tree. You've chiseled the marbled. You've begun.

~ Dani Shapiro

Writers begin with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.

~ Robert Black

When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.

~ Sam Shepard

I became a writer so that the voices inside my head would become an acceptable occurrence.

~ Janae Mitchell

I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time, – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding.

~ Brenda Ueland

I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work — one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The most difficult thing about writing, is writing the first line.

~ Amit Kalantri

I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.

~ Ian Hunter

Nothing leaves a scar upon an Authors heart more than a book they've written with purpose going unread.

~ Mark W. Boyer

It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you've sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.

~ Steven Pressfield

Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.

~ Italo Calvino

As long as music survives, poetry will never die.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

~ Nick Hornby

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

~ Kingsley Amis

Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.

~ John Irving

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him!

~ John Irving

America takes her writers too seriously.

~ Kingsley Amis

Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.

~ Brian A. Mcbride

I don't want to write soft, easy fiction; I want to write fiction that challenges.

~ Brian A. Mcbride

An unedited manuscript is a first draft of story, but is not a finished product. Too many writers study the craft of writing but do not acquire the skills of an editor.

~ Michael J. Kannengieser

This is a little secret that all writers share: We have two lives, the one we live on Earth and the one we live in our books.

~ Chrys Fey

The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.

~ Steven Pressfield

If you're frightened of the countless number of books in the library, you'll never write anything, until you close your eyes and hold the pen.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Each night, I close my eyes and dream. In the morning, I open my eyes again, but the dreaming doesn't stop.

~ Christy Hall

Sometimes I dream so vividly, so expectantly, I wonder if I'm crazy...

~ Christy Hall

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.

~ Rebecca Solnit

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.

~ Christy Hall

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

~ Shannon Celebi

Bootlicking is only a way to get published, not to become a writer

~ Himmilicious

It's hard to be a dreamer sometimes. I'm tired.

~ Christy Hall

Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.

~ Shannon Celebi

No.'It's not a bad word. And it is very important to use at times. Practice saying it in the mirror. It's empowering.

~ Christy Hall

I am swimming in a sea of words, attempting to keep my head above water.

~ Christy Hall

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

~ Christy Hall