Writers Quotes
That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds
I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Writers turn dreams into print.
Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.
Young writers need to be encouraged to write - just write - with no restrictions on form, style or content.
I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.
The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
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.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.
Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.
There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
To aspiring writers, I say : Don't give up. Storytelling has been an integral part of the human condition since the beginning of time. Don't let anyone tell you your dreams don't have value. They do.
I don't consider myself a great writer, but I would like to think that I can at least proof- read.
You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
