Actions Quotes Logo

Writers Quotes

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, ...

Show More

Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't ha...

Show More
Picture of Stephen King
Stephen KingOn Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any lo...

Show More

The truth is that most writers are needy.

Picture of Stephen King
Stephen KingOn Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusi...

Show More
Picture of Stephen King
Stephen KingThe Dark Half

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell ...

Show More

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itsel...

Show More

You connect yourself to the viewer by by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with ...

Show More

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical cla...

Show More

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to ...

Show More
Picture of Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk KiddTraveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

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

Show More
Picture of Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk KiddTraveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 20...

Show More

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, ...

Show More

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a gr...

Show More

I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better...

Show More

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a rea...

Show More

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a rea...

Show More

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors ...

Show More

He'd heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne. This is, of course...

Show More

Make foes of bowmen if you must,Never of penmen.

What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-co...

Show More
Picture of Thomas Mann
Thomas MannDeath in Venice and Other Tales

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, mi...

Show More

That's not writing that's typing.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long tim...

Show More

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to pre...

Show More

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive what...

Show More

Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wo...

Show More
Picture of Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le GuinSteering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown...

Show More

I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Ni...

Show More

And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminde...

Show More

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net ...

Show More

Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.

Picture of Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-WestThe Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his...

Show More

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they s...

Show More

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the o...

Show More

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

You cannot write unless you write much.

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfi...

Show More
Picture of Walter Benjamin
Walter BenjaminIlluminations: Essays and Reflections

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we ...

Show More

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-r...

Show More

I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand h...

Show More

I'm a writer. I write checks. Mostly fiction.

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long wa...

Show More

When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - ...

Show More

But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keep enough to go over the l...

Show More
Picture of Willa Cather
Willa CatherThe Selected Letters

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. ...

Show More

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer th...

Show More

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain)

Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of...

Show More

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend w...

Show More

I'm against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing wh...

Show More

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your car...

Show More

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.

Mark to yourself the gradual way in which you have been prepared for, and are now led by an irresist...

Show More

I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do—a Work, if you like, wit...

Show More

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how…If you practice an art faithfully it will ma...

Show More

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around S...

Show More
Picture of William S. Burroughs
William S. BurroughsThe Adding Machine: Selected Essays

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armeni...

Show More

You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

Picture of William Saroyan
William SaroyanThe Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills

Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the ...

Show More

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's...

Show More
Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figu...

Show More
Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.

Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like t...

Show More
Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.

Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush a...

Show More
Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush a...

Show More
Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.

Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the d...

Show More
Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom...

Show More
Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

Picture of William Zinsser
William ZinsserOn Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Now as through this world I ramble I see lots of funny men Some rob you with a six gun Some with a...

Show More

We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution,...

Show More

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.

Nature not content with denying him the ability to think has endowed him with the ability to write...

Show More

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can writ...

Show More

In that moment, Dan was reminded why he wanted to write in the first place. It was the same reason a...

Show More

To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.

A
AberjhaniJourney through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my...

Show More
A
AberjhaniVisions of a Skylark Dressed in Black

You have a great advantage as a writer, Monsieur,' said Poirot. 'You can relieve your feelings by ex...

Show More

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

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is...

Show More

If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuine...

Show More

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

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.

Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, th...

Show More

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to...

Show More

Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to...

Show More