Writer Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.

John Boyle O'Reilly

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

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.

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 heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

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

Catherine Drinker Bowen

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

Stephen E. Ambrose

None of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, — it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small. Let us believe it, then, once for all, that there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers.

Herman Melville

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

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

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

Alberto Moravia

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.

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

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

Thomas Robert Malthus

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.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

Anthony Burgess

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

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Catherine Drinker Bowen