All Quotes

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie

Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
‐‐ Garth Risk Hallberg

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
‐‐ Mary Oliver

Writers sometimes ruin a book by adding a lighthearted mood at the wrong moment.
‐‐ Gayle Lynds

Writers sometimes write things for me and I like to see what they write because I want to see what their take on my delivery is or what they think that I can do with something. So I kind of leave that to them.
‐‐ Isaiah Mustafa

Writers speak stench.
‐‐ Franz Kafka

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
‐‐ Richard Price

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.
‐‐ Giles Foden

Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
‐‐ Tanith Lee

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.
‐‐ James Lasdun

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.
‐‐ Leland Ryken

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.
‐‐ Christopher Koch

Writers transform: they throw a hand grenade into the notion of reality that people carry around in their heads. That's very dangerous, very destructive, but not to do it means you are satisfied with the status quo - and that's a kind of danger as well, because a kind of violence is already being perpetuated.
‐‐ John Edgar Wideman

Writers used to make such wonderful pictures without all that swearing, all that cursing. And now it seems that you can't say three words without cursing. And I don't think that's right.
‐‐ Ernest Borgnine

Writers usually don't get to pick our own covers. I know it's surprising to hear that.
‐‐ Holly Black

Writers want publicity all the time, and they are always nagging their agents and publishers to give them more publicity, but, when you get it, it's kind of soul-destroying.
‐‐ Kate Thompson

Writers want to be reread. They want to think that their words don't just flash by but deserve some reflection.
‐‐ Bobbie Ann Mason

Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.
‐‐ Laurie Anderson

Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.
‐‐ Mariella Frostrup

Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.
‐‐ Larry Kramer

Writers who aren't from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies.
‐‐ Kent Haruf

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
‐‐ Florence King

Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.
‐‐ Erin McKean

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.
‐‐ Justin Cronin

Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
‐‐ Jim Crace

Writers will happen in the best of families.
‐‐ Rita Mae Brown

Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.
‐‐ Julius Schwartz

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.
‐‐ Jerry B. Jenkins

Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it's nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.
‐‐ J. Michael Straczynski

Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.
‐‐ Sigourney Weaver

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
‐‐ Aldous Huxley

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
‐‐ Octavio Paz

Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.
‐‐ Johnny Vegas

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.
‐‐ R. A. Salvatore

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.
‐‐ Robert Crais

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
‐‐ Mario Vargas Llosa

Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.
‐‐ Neel Mukherjee

Writing a book is not a crime.
‐‐ Alexander Ahndoril

Writing a book is not a small undertaking, but God placed it on my heart to trust Him with such a project.
‐‐ Benjamin Watson

Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.
‐‐ Bette Midler

Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.
‐‐ Stephen Collins

Writing a book is usually a full-time job that takes years. I didn't have years. So I decided to crowdsource content for the book.
‐‐ Vivek Wadhwa

Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.
‐‐ Ron Carlson

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
‐‐ Don Marquis

Writing a book, you can only get stopped by yourself.
‐‐ S. J. Rozan

Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development.
‐‐ Norman Macleod

Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.'
‐‐ Leigh Brackett

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
‐‐ Rachel Kushner

Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.
‐‐ Michael Arndt