Writer Quotes

• The writer must resist this temptation to quote and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.

  

  Ethel Smyth
  • Temptation
  • Musicians
  • Score

• The only person stopping you from doing something is yourself, and looking for excuses all the time just gets in the way of obtaining your own goals. It's like the writer who keeps getting up and straightening the pictures in the room.

  

  Chrissie Hynde Pretenders
  • Up
  • Time
  • Person

• I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer . . . if he can only . . . tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes.

  

  Clive Barnes
  • People
  • Great
  • Heart

• Lilian Ross was a - veteran writer for The New Yorker. She, in fact, brought me to The New Yorker many years ago.

  

  Nat Hentoff
  • Writer
  • Years Ago
  • The New Yorker

• As a writer who has struggled with depression, the question is one that has long troubled me. Should I resist treatment, on the off-chance my creative output will somehow be affected?

  

  Andrew Shaffer
  • Depression
  • Writer
  • Output

• I never intended to become a writer.

  

  Richard Selzer
  • Writer
  • Become
  • Intended

• That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

  

  Adam Haslett
  • People
  • Job
  • Slow

• It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

  

  Gerald Brenan
  • Write
  • Writer
  • Amateurs

• You do not need to go to journalism school if you want to work in the fashion industry. I think high schools condition you to think this way: If you want to be a fashion editor, go to fashion school. If you want to be a writer, you should study journalism. I think that the best school in life is experience.

  

  Eva Chen
  • High School
  • Journalism
  • Fashion Industry

• I am practical by nature, and I'd heard that being a writer or an artist is a good way to starve! So I was an economics major at Oklahoma State, and then received an M.S. from Cornell in Agricultural Resource and Managerial Economics. I knew if I wanted to write I would do it on my own, but I knew I wouldn't make myself study economics on my own.

  

  Ally Carter
  • Artist
  • Study
  • Writer

• Robert Smigel is one of the greatest comedy writers in the last 50 years. "TV Funhouse" and Triumph and all those sketches. He's really unique, and he has an amazing comedy mind.

  

  Neal Brennan
  • Comedy
  • Unique
  • Robert Smigel

• The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

  

  Robert Frost
  • True
  • Reader
  • Ear

• I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.

  

  Nick Cave The Birthday Party
  • Idea
  • Write
  • Script

• Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.

  

  Marge Piercy
  • Work
  • Understanding
  • Study

• The writer studies literature, not the world.

  

  Annie Dillard
  • World
  • Literature
  • Writer

• The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

  

  Alicia Ostriker
  • Mother
  • Writer
  • Significance

• I am not an autobiographical writer. I'll take little elements here and there from things that I've actually experienced-counting eyelashes on a sleeping beauty, for example.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Beauty
  • Writer
  • Eyelashes

• You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

  

  Paul Simon Simon & Garfunkel
  • Find
  • Writer
  • Pen

• I think as he gets older, Quentin Tarantino is growing more and more into his directorial side, but the writer in him won't stop the pen. I don't think he deserved a directing nod. Like I said, it's beautifully shot - it's cinematography, obviously, deserves a nomination - but he's not the camera man.

  

  Bun B
  • Cinematography
  • Quentin Tarantino
  • Directorial side

• If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.

  

  Eric Bentley
  • Theatre
  • Image
  • Translated

• Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

  

  Louise Erdrich
  • Love
  • Feels
  • Place

• A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.

  

  Barbara Holland
  • Keys
  • Notes
  • Typewriter

• Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

  

  Ismail Kadare
  • Enemy
  • Writer
  • Dictatorship

• If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.

  

  Robert Frost
  • Writer
  • Cry
  • Reader

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