All Quotes

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.
‐‐ Len Deighton

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
‐‐ Beverly Cleary

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
‐‐ F. Sionil Jose

Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
‐‐ Siri Hustvedt

Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.
‐‐ Brian Lumley

Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.
‐‐ John Banville

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

Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.
‐‐ Joy Williams

Writers are magpies by nature, always collecting shiny things, storing them away and looking for connections of things.
‐‐ John Connolly

Writers are nosy people; we are endlessly curious: we ask questions when we shouldn't - we peek around corners when we are least expected.
‐‐ Ann Turner

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
‐‐ E. L. Doctorow

Writers are not meant for action.
‐‐ Manuel Puig

Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times - the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is being told in some of the greatest books of our time.
‐‐ Geoff Dyer

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.
‐‐ Joyce Carol Oates

Writers are often alone when they work. Hours pass in silence as one long moment; light fades as day turns back to face the coming night.
‐‐ Simon Van Booy

Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.
‐‐ Dani Shapiro

Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.
‐‐ Richard Russo

Writers are rememberers.
‐‐ Pete Hamill

Writers are so important.
‐‐ Adam Driver

Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens.
‐‐ David Mitchell

Writers are socially observant. We find people endlessly fascinating, and real life is mysterious. Sometimes it's hard to stop staring at the strut and squawk of my fellow man. They can be quite inspiring. Sometimes it's hard to stop talking to them to see what in the world they're thinking.
‐‐ Julianna Baggott

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.
‐‐ Oliver North

Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing.
‐‐ Judith Rossner

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.
‐‐ Meghan Daum

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.
‐‐ Connie Willis

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.
‐‐ Deb Caletti

Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.
‐‐ John le Carre

Writers are used to being re-created, and need it.
‐‐ David James Duncan

Writers are very much undervalued in the creative process.
‐‐ Rachel Ward

Writers aren't born properly labeled so it is hard to know one when one appears.
‐‐ Julianna Baggott

Writers aren't in competition with one another. It isn't a zero sum game. If you have a good book, a good cover, a good product description, and a low price, you can sell well.
‐‐ J. A. Konrath

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.
‐‐ Anne Rice

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
‐‐ Peter Carey

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.
‐‐ Bill Walsh

Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.
‐‐ Paul Di Filippo

Writers can feel pretty powerless in the big corporate world of publishing, but sometimes our greatest power is the ability to say 'no.'
‐‐ Carrie Vaughn

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?
‐‐ Michelle Huneven

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
‐‐ Jim Harrison

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.
‐‐ Sarah Hall

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
‐‐ Mona Simpson

Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It's better to say that you haven't got the right pencil than to say you can't write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it's better lost.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel

Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.
‐‐ Jojo Moyes

Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
‐‐ Italo Calvino

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.
‐‐ Monica Johnson

Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel

Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
‐‐ Adam Ross

Writers don't always know what they mean - that's why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one.
‐‐ John Lahr

Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.
‐‐ John Metcalf

Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write.
‐‐ Claire Tomalin