Writer Quotes
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I firmly believe that there is no better thriller writer than Harlan Coben.
Ravi Subramanian
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When a novelist has “something to say,” they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means “commitment,” as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance. I am against this.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
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The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
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I think the internet is a great marketing tool--but marketing is not my job. I'm a writer. My job is to write novels.
Bentley Little
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When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.
Joseph Kanon
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... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
Marcel Proust
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Like so many children who read a lot, I begin to declare rather early that I want to be a writer. But this is the only way I have of articulating a different desire, a desire that I can’t yet understand. What I really want is to be transported into a space in which everything is as distinct, complete, and intelligible as in the stories I read. And, like most children, I’m a literalist through and through. I want reality to imitate books – and books to capture the essence of reality. I love words insofar as they correspond to the world, insofar as they give it to me in a heightened form. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become – and such lucidity is a form of joy. Sometimes, when I find a new expression, I roll it on the tongue, as if shaping it in my mouth gave birth to a new shape in the world. Nothing fully exists until it is articulated.
Eva Hoffman
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If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.
Charlie Jane Anders
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I'm not a very good writer. I'm working at it.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment.
William Sansom
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I'm a very careful, slow writer, and I think a lot of that comes from the care required to be a hand-printer, where if something isn't spaced out enough, you take little slivers of brass or copper and put them between each letter.
Paul Fleischman
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That I was a writer was further proof of God’s far-sightedness; she was convinced that by some magic of propinquity she would acquire a mastery of the English language.
Bel Kaufman
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The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
William Faulkner
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It's a challenge for any writer to write beyond what he knows. You get material, adapt it, and do the best you can with it.
John Whitney "Whit" Stillman
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I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
William Faulkner
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As long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer.
Michael Easton
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If you don't want to be in a story, don't know a writer.
Ethan Mordden
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As an actor, my No. 1 focus was to be on the same page with the writer, director, and producers.
Haaz Sleiman
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It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer."
Soren Kierkegaard
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I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.
Steve Erickson
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The road to wisdom is paved with excess. The mark of a true writer is their ability to mystify the familiar and familiarize the strange.
Walt Whitman
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A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.
Judith Tarr
