Writers Quotes

Writers are made, they are not born.

Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer?A: Explaining what that is.

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley’s personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical—the way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

A fiery spirit bursts from your soul.

Books can change the world. They represent a second chance for those that want to change their life and can’t.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Believe you me, I am all for you; and wish you well - for you to go to hell.

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.

Yes, its hard to write. But its harder not to.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm

I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

Write what speaks to your soul.

A women does not become whole, until she has a baby.

Because. Everything worth anything takes time.

Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.

She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave her inspiration. However her heart lacked the will as the empty words enclosed her soul pulling it down towards the frenzied ravenous imps that stalked hells pantry....

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.

I'm against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I'd almost prefer the word 'craftsman'. He's like one of those old-fashioned ship builders who conceived the build of the boat in their mind and after that touched every single piece that went into the boat.

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

She was like a mermaid enrapturing me the sailor with all her charms!

And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?

The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises.

I am as disillusioned with the number of likes for one's posts on social networking sites as I am with the number of followers in one's social network. A great number of people liking your work does not prove your mettle as a writer or as an artiste!If my work can affect even one person and make him/her think then I am satisfied as a writer.

Sensitive people care when the world doesn't because we understand waiting to be rescued and no one shows up. We have rescued ourselves, so many times that we have become self taught in the art of compassion for those forgotten.

She asked me the definition of beauty. So I told her name in my reply!

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.

I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.

Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

If there weren’t so many interesting conversations taking place inside my head, I might venture to speak out loud.

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

I love the smell of coffee when I wake up in the morning. It gives me the awesome feeling of hope!

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Whenever we talk about darkness and light, the terms seem so abstract that many consider the answers to be found in meditation and yoga, but I’m here to tell you that the answers are in the books you will never read, waiting all your life in the libraries you ignored and the bookstores you didn’t visit. I’m here to tell you as well that you are your own Satan and evil can’t possibly interfere more in your life than what you’re already doing to yourself by remaining ignorant. Until you choose the light, darkness is your personal choice, and there’s no reason to feel any empathy for you.

Writers are engineers of human souls.

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. (“Mad House”)

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

Forget about how old you are, and get busy.

I didn't come looking for you the day you uninvitedly appeared on my doorstepHow did we go from nonchalant conversation me waiting for you to turn me off with corny jokes and mind dumbing conversationto loveTo love and mind blowing chemistry that I've yet to make sense of What are you here to teach me?

Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.