Writers Quotes
1,786 quotes
"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
"Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called."
"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
"great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it."
"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."
"Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?"
"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."
"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"
"The darkness has ink eyes, and if you stare long enough, you’re going to see it blink black. That’s the moment to start writing."
"Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river."
"Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written."
"My hands could be considered deadly weapons. You see, I write with both of them."
"In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book."
"A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to."
"You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves."
"You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]"
"Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion."
"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together."
"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]"
"You don’t make art out of good intentions."
"Writers will happen in the best of families."
"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of."
"Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."
"Writers write while dreamers procastinate."
"Inside of all of us there is the need and the desire to be heard, to have our innermost thoughts, feelings and desires expressed for others to hear, to see and to understand. We all want to matter to someone, to leave a mark. Writers just take those thoughts, feelings and desires and express them in such a way that the reader not only reads them but feels them as well."
"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly."
"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."
"...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels."
"Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story."
"All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea."
"The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."
". . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them."
"A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him."
"Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light."
"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"
"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more."
"The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste."
"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."
"Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him."
"I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite."
"Writing well means never having to say, "I guess you had to be there."
"But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]"
"I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."
"A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion."
"[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!"
"(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours."
"But still I feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, "alright sucker, now what?"
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