Writer Quotes
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Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).
J. R. R. Tolkien
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A writer is not interested in explaining reality, he’s only interested in capturing it.
Brendan Kennelly
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Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.
Andrew Shaffer
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I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.
Chuck Klosterman
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To my mind, it’s one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it’s good.
Brad Leithauser
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Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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I think every writer lives for the thought that there will be a moment when somebody reads something on the page and says, "Yes!"
Marianne Williamson
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You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.
Paul Simon
Simon & Garfunkel
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I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.
Marge Piercy
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But it is not at all unthinkable for anyone to tell a writer how to write. It comes with the territory.
Ernest Lehman
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I had to decide if I wanted to be known as a writer or a reader. I chose writer.
Nathan Lowell
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I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.
Alan Alda
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A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls.
Walt Whitman
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What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul, a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome and therefore, of what use graduate work?
Brad Gooch
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You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.
Anne Bernays
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I do find that people are incredibly naive about what it is to be a writer. Like you would pay an incredible amount of money for an MFA program and still not have the slightest idea of how one goes about becoming a writer. So, I'm always flabbergasted when people say, "Oh, I was invited to do a reading, but I'm not going to read because I don't have a book.".
Faith Adiele
