Top 1200 Gifted Writers Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists.

Procrastination: as endemic to and dreaded by writers as writers' block.

I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood.

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.

When I look at the list of my favorite works, writers who are women do tend to outnumber writers who are men for whatever reason.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

Sloane Crosley and David Sedaris are two of my favorite writers; they're the kind of writers who make you feel like, 'I can do this. I want to do this.'

I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.

I get to meet writers, and I love writers.

Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches.

Writers from the majority can assume their audiences know what they're talking about - they don't have to explain things, whereas minority writers are expected to.

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

I read continually and don't understand writers who say they don't read while working on a book. For a start, a book takes me about two years to write, so there's no way I am depriving myself of reading during that time. Another thing is that reading other writers is continually inspiring - reading great writers reminds you how hard you have to work.

I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed. There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers. And it's appropriate, because the writer is getting paid and the reader isn't.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.

Why are you uncomfortable with the supernaturalist worldview of the biblical writers? Evangelicals don't want to just say, "Well, the inspired writers were wrong about some of their beliefs about the spiritual world and its inhabitants." That really doesn't work in a confessional situation! So instead we come up with excuses and interpretations that allow us to remake the biblical writers in our own post-Enlightenment image. I understand that impulse, but it's not honest.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.

Reality television is a scripted hyper-life that employs writers, but won't allow them to call themselves writers or join the union.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.

I have a well-balanced show. It's 50/50 on men/women, and also African-American/white writers, it's the same thing. I have four African-American writers, and four non-African-American writers.

It's fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn't very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.

My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

All of my works are performance pieces, as is true for many writers of color, writers who have indigenous roots - because our basis is spoken word.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

A lot of writers, probably because they're sensitive, which makes them want to be writers, have fears about their masculinity, so they overcompensate by having an interest in boxing and tough-guy things.

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.

All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.

There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's not necessarily their rap.

All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

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.

I think more talented writers should get involved in the industry, yes, of course. But that doesn't presuppose that those writers have to be novelists or screenwriters.

There are writers I return to no matter what I'm working on, writers like the South African J.M. Coetzee. He has an ability to make you feel that he is writing for you alone.

Writers' communities are very helpful to writers because it gives them a way to try out their stuff short of publication.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.

I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

The reality is that there are half a billion kids in India, in villages, who have a pre-determined life. If they're very lucky and they're a gifted athlete, maybe they can compete for the Olympics, or maybe they can get into the military. But if you're not a gifted athlete, then you're going to end up working for your family and you're going to perpetuate what your family is. It's gotten to the point, in villages, where there's no hope. And the first spark of hope is when you ask yourself the question,"What gift did God give me that I can develop and use to better my life?"

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.