Writer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Isaac Asimov

Stephen King

Samuel Johnson

Dr. Seuss

Joan Didion

Carson McCullers

John Harington (writer)

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

You [an aspiring writer] can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Maurice Blanchot

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

Humphrey Carpenter

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Edward Dahlberg

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

Thomas Robert Malthus

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

Gwendolyn Brooks

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Anatole Broyard

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

François-René de Chateaubriand

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

Alberto Moravia

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

James A. Michener

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor