Writers Quotes

“The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.”
― Theodore Geisel

“Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?”
― Félix J. Palma, The Map of the Sky

“As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.”
― Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions

“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.”
― James Michener

“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”
― Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

“We writers are resilient souls.”
― Lauren DeStefano, Wither

“human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.”
― Martial, Epigrams

“To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.”
― Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s

“I don't know why anyone would be scared of a homeless person. The truly scary people are all the murder mystery writers. They spend all day thinking of the perfect plot on how to kill someone and get away with it.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“This much is true: When you are about to effect the lives of hundreds of people, Satan will do everything he can to prevent it from happening. Often pride and anger are his best assassins.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.”
― Kellie Elmore

“Don't let yourself be amazed by the imagination of a writer and his words, writers are almost all the time in a love-hate relationship with words.”
― Nema Al-Araby

“We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.”
― L.L. Barkat, The Novelist

“What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.
"Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable..."
"What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh.
"Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity."
"A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.”
― P.D. James, Unnatural Causes

“If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.”
― L.L. Barkat, The Novelist

“In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have—the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.”
― Jonathan Stalling

“Falling in love with a writer is a dangerous thing, isn't it? The only thing you get out of it sometimes is immortality.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two.”
― Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

“Writers, even unpublished writers, have a tendency not to notice what’s going on around them when they are the center of attention.”
― Gary Reilly, Ticket To Hollywood

“One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back.

“Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned.

“Writing for me,” Megan had typed.

“I’ll write you a tea fortune.”

“No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.”
― L.L. Barkat

“She meant you have to live a story for a time.'

'And?'

'And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?'

'Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.'

'Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.”
― L.L. Barkat, The Novelist

“Do Engineers have stories, Jack?" he asked.

"What?" Jack said, without moving.

"Stories. Myths. Things to keep the boredom out on a long shift."

"I think they play cards, mostly," Jack answered. It was a lie, but he told it with surprising deftness; not a waver in his voice or a hesitation in his words. Only the tightening of his shoulders told Ellis he was lying.”
― Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle

“My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”
― Michelle Geaney

“Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die—if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.”
― L.L. Barkat, The Novelist

“You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn’t it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. “She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”

The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit.”
― L.L. Barkat, The Novelist