Writers Quotes

Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and peopl...

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need ...

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it p...

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was think...

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet a...

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations ...

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mo...

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he...

The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the t...

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interes...

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from ...

Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is h...

When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall g...

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject wit...

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the nigh...

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of th...

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done but you d...

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of tim...

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

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

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new...

In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary peop...

My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness.

Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"Neil Gaiman: "Yes. Growing up is highly overr...

Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to b...

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar respo...

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is be...

You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country...

I am the penny whistle of American literature.

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest ...

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the ...

People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional de...

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creati...

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not d...

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he...

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any wri...

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create...

I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

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

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens ...

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecess...

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops d...

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is...

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reig...

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look a...

Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday ...

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning ...

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape he...

Business or profession?''I guess you'd call me a writer.'No profession,' said the police car, as if ...

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the...

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I s...

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy o...

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must se...

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That "writers write" is meant to be self-eviden...

Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ...

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more...

God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our he...

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A...

Writers will happen in the best of families.

The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled ...

The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled ...

It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.

No tears and the writer no tears and the reader.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the...

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in...

There is but one art to omit.

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without pri...

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to th...

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is...

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go...

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

(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a consta...

human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, ca...

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

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

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not oblige...

When an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance and when he is dead ...

Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine strik...

The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the par...

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zanines...

Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the ...