Top 1200 Writer Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting. . . . Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur.

I am very fortunate in that I have spent pretty much my whole life being a writer, and before I was a writer, I was a storyteller.

I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one.

I don't know what it must be like to be a writer in general, but to be a comedy writer, it's got to be something - it's a very special kind of talent.

I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

I like to think I've grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer.

When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

The first thing you have to understand is that I was not desperate to be a writer. I was never a closet writer filing away notes in a cupboard.

I consider myself a writer, foremost - a nonfiction writer.

One of the hopes we have when we hear or read an interview with a mystery writer is to get inside the writer's head, to learn something we didn't know before.

The best advice that an accomplished writer could give a beginning writer is probably, "Find your slide and then grease it." Almost every writer that wants a rewarding career, in terms of money and status and number of readers, finally finds a certain genre or certain style that he or she sticks with until reaching a critical mass of readership. And I've violated this from the get-go.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

I wanted to be a writer and I ended up being a writer.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

If a writer doesn't do anything but give a new word to his language and, from there, maybe to other languages, I think that writer redefines the world.

As an actor you can always blame the director or writer for negative feedback. But as a writer, you're the reason why everyone's in the room.

Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.

I've learned to accept that I'm a children's writer, even if it's not what I set out to become. It's what I should have been all along, and I'll stay in this role as long as I'm a writer.

I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

The nightmare of censorship has always cast a shadow over my thoughts. Both under the previous state and under the Islamic state, I have said again and again that, when there is an apparatus for censorship that filters all writing, an apparatus comes into being in every writer's mind that says: "Don't write this, they won't allow it to be published." But the true writer must ignore these murmurings. The true writer must write. In the end, it will be published one day, on the condition that the writer writes the truth and does not dissemble.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

I was always interested in being a writer. Yet, at the time, it somehow seemed more unfeasible to be a writer than a musician.

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.

The most difficult thing about living as a writer is precisely 'having to write.' Pretending to be a writer is easy. Living freely, reading many books, going on frequent trips, cultivating minor eccentricities... but genuinely being a writer is difficult, because you have to write something that will convince both yourself and readers.

I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.

I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer - in the form of a review or something.

When I began writing, the words that inspired me were these: A writer is someone who has written today. If you want to be a writer, whats stopping you?

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.

I've been a writer for years, but it was mainly as a function of trying to be a director, so I just got work as a writer. I want to keep directing.

A real writer [...] looks not in another writer but himself.

Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.

I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.

I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him.

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

In a writer there must always be two people - the writer and the critic.

Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.

I would be ecstatic if the very first writer to step foot in a Storyknife cabin was an Alaska Native woman writer.

I'm an aspiring writer. I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy.

What I'd like to be is a unique writer who's different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers'.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal." -The Carrie Diaries pg. 337

As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.

In order to be a good writer, you've got to be a bad boss. Self-discipline and stamina are the two major arms in a writer's arsenal.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.