Writer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Gaston Bachelard

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

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

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

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

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