Writer Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Isaac Asimov

Samuel Johnson

Stephen King

Dr. Seuss

Dean Acheson

Edward Albee

Martin Amis

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.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

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

Henryk Sienkiewicz

This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. … To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost — the lost valleys of the imagination.

Alexander Cockburn

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

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.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer – reading is so much a part of it.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Nations are represented by their poets and their writers in the open competition for the Nobel Prize. Consequently the award of the Prize by the Academy glorifies not only the author but the people whose son he is, and it bears witness that that nation has a share in the universal achievement, that its efforts are fruitful, and that it has the right to live for the profit of mankind. If this honour is premous to all, it is infinitely more so to Poland. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph. Like Galileo, one is forced to think when before the eyes of the world homage has been rendered to the importance of Poland's achievement and her genius.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

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

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

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

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

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

As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.

Carl Van Vechten

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

This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius. For this I should like to express my most ardent and most sincere gratitude as a Pole to you gentlemen, the members of the Swedish Academy, and I conclude by borrowing the words of Horace: "To have earned the goodwill of the great is not the least of merits."

Henryk Sienkiewicz

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.