Writers Quotes

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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...

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

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

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear...

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their ...

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The wr...

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the fe...

Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of ...

Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened...

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poet...

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who...

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of ins...

Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is ...

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to...

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make ...

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing ...

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost...

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell the...

Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to for now is to write a d...

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic,...

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wrac...

He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.

Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do ...

My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the ...

Begin with another's to end with your own.

The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and...

...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?""To be a writer, you need readers.""I'm ...

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

All we have is compassion and stories.

Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fift...