Writer Quotes · Page 236

“I bought a book on willpower, but I only got halfway through.”

— Stewart Lee Beck

You write for other people and it feels you're giving a little bit of yourself away.

— Dean Lewis

Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.

— Kevin J. Anderson

I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.

— Frederick Busch

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.

— Tana French

“I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“To write truthfully you must live, and you must feel what you are living.”

— Arturo Barea

“The best thing about writing is that your imagination has no bounds.”

— Wayne Ellis

I definitely want to write some fiction, for sure. I already have half of the next book. I already have it all…

— Moshe Kasher

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.

— Len Deighton

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I think you write only out of a great trouble. A trouble of excitement, a trouble of enlargement, a trouble of displacement…

— Eleanor Clark

“We loved all the words in your manuscript, but we were wondering if you could maybe put them in a completely different…

— Dave Coverly

The way I write is totally instinctive. I just write what I feel or what I find funny - and hope everyone…

— Sophie Kinsella

“Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.”

— David Gordon

“Does anybody else find it annoying when you put a hold on like 5 books but it takes like a month for…

— Ling

When you get the ideas, that's a thrill; when you're writing the book and it's corning out well, that's a thrill; when…

— Robert Cormier

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably…

— Jeanette Winterson

I wasn't a frustrated writer who really wanted to act or a frustrated writer who really wanted to direct. I was really…

— Leigh Whannell

“It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out…

— Robert W. Chambers

“There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader…

— Nicholas Carr

I thought, 'Nobody wants this book, and I'm an idiot for having worked on it so hard.' But to succeed in writing,…

— Min Jin Lee

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than…

— Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've…

— Neil Gaiman

“Read regularly. Reading for thirty minutes a day will do wonders for you.”

— Robin S. Sharma

I tried to write with someone else once before, but it was not successful.

— Paula Danziger

“...and my books are like friends that I come back to at night." ~Cynthia Batten”

— Cynthia Batten

The mind's cross indexing puts the best librarian to shame.

— Sharon Begley

When I was younger, I wondered if it was possible to be a good person and a writer.

— Karl Ove Knausgard

Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.

— William Shakespeare

The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.

— Daniel Alarcon

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

— Richard Flanagan

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

— Philip Roth

“What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.”

— Julian Barnes

“I may have lost the academic plot, but my girly bits were definitely taking notes.”

— Georgina Guthrie

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

— Colm Toibin

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

— Kim Edwards

To tell the truth, I don't read children's books. I'm an adult. I just write them.

— William Steig

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

— Laura Dern

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

— Henry David Thoreau