All Quotes

Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.
‐‐ Andy Rooney

Writers don't write about people they know. They write what they know about people.
‐‐ Jan Mark

Writers don't write writing, they write reading. When I was a kid, I read four or five books a week. And that is how I became a writer.
‐‐ Avi

Writers, especially those of us with roots in other countries, are rarely left to ourselves. We are asked to declare our allegiances, or they are determined for us.
‐‐ Dinaw Mengestu

Writers generally get into writing because they want to write, not because they want to be independent publishers, and you can't really fault someone for saying, 'What I'm doing right now works, so there's no reason to change it.'
‐‐ Jennifer Armintrout

Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie

Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.
‐‐ Sara Sheridan

Writers have opinions - that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.
‐‐ Frank Delaney

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
‐‐ Andre Dubus III

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.
‐‐ Susan Vreeland

Writers have to be very careful and discerning because so much of the machine is out of their control.
‐‐ Tamsin Greig

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
‐‐ Jeanette Winterson

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
‐‐ Charles Bukowski

Writers have told me more than once that I'm a better interview in defeat than in victory, which is a compliment I am extremely proud of.
‐‐ Jack Nicklaus

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.
‐‐ Don DeLillo

Writers keep writing and publishers publishing - it never grows boring.
‐‐ Michael Dirda

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.
‐‐ Gunter Grass

Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.
‐‐ Peter Bichsel

Writers like John T. Edge, whose work is all about the cultural histories behind food, have done so much to show that these stories are a really vital part of our cultural heritage.
‐‐ Michael Paterniti

Writers like to feel sorry for themselves, which is easy to do in private, but when called on to feel sorry for ourselves in social situations, we will often do so by sharing terrible book tour stories.
‐‐ Jonathan Dee

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.
‐‐ Susan Orlean

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

Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.
‐‐ Mason Cooley

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
‐‐ Mary Oliver

Writers need to be tough. This is not for the weak of will. And we have to realize that, yeah, it's never good enough. It's not like fixing a car where it's precise and we know what the end result will be definitively.
‐‐ David Morrell

Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
‐‐ Jonathan Coe

Writers never get a very good deal in Hollywood.
‐‐ Richard O'Brien

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.
‐‐ Florence King

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
‐‐ Jonathan Safran Foer

Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.
‐‐ Alexander McCall Smith

Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages.
‐‐ Jess Row

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

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
‐‐ Irwin Shaw

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
‐‐ Barry Unsworth

Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.
‐‐ Mary Wortley Montagu

Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.
‐‐ Claire Tomalin

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.
‐‐ Kevin Kwan

Writers on etiquette receive a continuous flow of questions on subjects such as 'When is it too early in the season to wear white accessories?' and 'What is the proper gift to send to a family in mourning?'
‐‐ Letitia Baldrige

Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
‐‐ Natasha Trethewey

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
‐‐ Edna O'Brien

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.
‐‐ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion.
‐‐ Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
‐‐ Helen Garner

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.
‐‐ Catherine Drinker Bowen

Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.
‐‐ Emma Donoghue

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
‐‐ Daphne du Maurier

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
‐‐ Edna Ferber

Writers should provoke disagreement.
‐‐ V. S. Naipaul