Top 665 Writers Quotes

Some creative writing programs seem evil, but my experience at Irvine was totally the opposite, where I feel like they were really good at focusing in on each writers voice and setting. When I felt like I was obligated to write a story that was more typical, no one really liked it.

Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.

I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they’re not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.

New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.

There’s a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.

Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer’s life with the writing. I think that’s something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

There’s that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

There may be something to the suggestion about the pace of technological change intimidating writers, though – it’s been awfully hard to keep ahead of real developments.

Science fiction writers aren’t fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

They’re naughty, all those writers – they mess around with people. I know James Gandolfini got a bit fed up on ‘The Sopranos’: if he said anything in front of a writer, told them a story from his life, it could make its way into the script.

Writers are so important.

Now that I’m taking some time off from school, I’ve been reading a lot to make sure I don’t forget everything. It’s mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the ’40s and ’50s.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn’t it? I know it’s possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.

I think a lot of writers spend years just getting up the courage to write because it seems like such a fantasy of a profession. My dad saved me all that time by making me think, ‘Oh, anyone can be a writer. It’s like being a firefighter or a lawyer.’

I think it’s a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it’s better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

Writers don’t retire. I will always be a writer.

I wish one time in my life I could do what other writers do… get me a villa in Spain and go there to write a book.

Writers have always been very underrated.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers – encouraging them to die.

Tchaikovsky was one of the great melody writers of all time.

I’ve discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.

Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.

I’m very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I’m much less driven than they are. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don’t suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don’t like the wispy and the vague… or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I’m impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I’ve done have come to me by instinct.

In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.

I don’t think, generally speaking, people become writers because they were the really good, really cool, attractive kid in class. I’ll be honest. This is our revenge for people who were much better looking and more popular than us. I was a bit like that, I suppose.

Things like ‘mad as a hatter’ or ‘grinning like a Cheshire cat’, are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.

I think for writers who write that kind of stuff, they want to make changes. Look at Kris Kristofferson and Dylan. I mean, whole generations come along liking that stuff and that’s great.

Writers will happen in the best of families.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.

Since fantasy isn’t about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it’s changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

I work every morning, all morning, sometimes in the afternoons. Then sometimes I hunt in the afternoons – quail, doves, grouse up north – but just to stay alive, because writers die from their lifestyle but also from their lack of movement.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support, and it’s really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here, where they’re all trying to murder each other.

At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers’ groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they’re on a tour.

As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.

It fills my heart with pride and joy that international food writers and press have taken an interest in Tijuana.

I’m more influenced by my own interests than anyone else’s. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can’t entertain anyone else.

I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be ‘Lost’: I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

I don’t think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can’t teach them is the very essence of poetry.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It’s endless. I’m sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

As soon as I started writing, other writers stopped wanting me acting in their shows – maybe they thought I was going to rewrite them.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: ‘For God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you.’

There are writers out there who say they’re writing a second series, and then you pick it up and it feels exactly the same, only the lead character is blonde instead of brunette.

There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.

I have a great job writing for ‘The Office,’ but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I’ll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

I had to prepare physically every day, and I didn’t leave many scraps for the writers.

I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?