Writer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Isaac Asimov

Stephen King

Samuel Johnson

Dr. Seuss

Joan Didion

Carson McCullers

John Harington (writer)

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

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.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?

Julio Cortázar

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Lawrence Clark Powell

What no wife of a writer can ever understand, no matter if she lives with him for twenty years, is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases – threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.

The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers. I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.

Sheri S. Tepper

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

James A. Michener

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

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.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle 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

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

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

L. Sprague de Camp

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

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

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

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.