Writer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

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

Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.

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

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Jorge Luis Borges

Omit needless words.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

William Strunk Jr.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

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

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

There is no denying the fact that writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

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

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Flannery O'Connor