Writer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

Of course the writer cannot always burn with a hard gemlike flame or a white heat, but it should be possible to be a chubby hot-water bottle, rendering maximum attentiveness in the most enterprising sentences.

The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who calls attention to his style, is like the farmer who devotes his energies to polishing farm implements and never uses them.

I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.

Nadine Gordimer

The writer needs good works—good literary ones (33).

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.

And yes, again, that was it exactly. A retyper and not a writer. A prodigy and not a genius.

Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech. We must be intensely private and interior in order to find a voice and a vision — and we must bring our work to an outside world where the market, or public outrage, or even government censorship can destroy our voice.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

He had stylized himself—life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

There have always seemed to the writer sound reasons for using the module system in architectural design.

Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.

Henry Louis Gates

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.

The Wild Hunt is known in all Celtic countries; it is a huntsman with a pack of hounds who is seen or heard to rush through the country. Those who see him are doomed to die. The writer heard the Wild Hunt quite distinctly one night in Wales several years ago, but has not suffered any ill effects from it as yet.

Robertson Davies

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct. It is the business of critical biography to make the two overlap—to bring some of the furniture out to the garden, as it were, and spread flowers all over the house.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

Mignon McLaughlin

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty... It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.

Russell T Davies

I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song, [...] It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave...