Writer Quotes · Page 238

It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.

— L.P. Hartley

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

— John Updike

“Reading great books gives insight to the mind of great souls.”

— Lailah Gifty Akita

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

— Tom Clancy

No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life.

— Laura Esquivel

And please God, grant me the wisdom to remember that I am writing for children, not golden stickers.

— Rick Riordan

When you write, you put your thoughts in the public space. You get both positive and negative feedback.

— Ravi Subramanian

I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime

— Anne McCaffrey

For me and my storytelling and the way that I embrace stories in the way that I embrace characters, I desperately needed…

— Will Smith

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised…

— Dan Simmons

As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them…

— Colson Whitehead

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.

— William Zinsser

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because…

— Patti Smith

This is the biggest trick of the sort of thing I write: creating fun, powerful stories with tons of interesting stuff going…

— Kameron Hurley

“During his reading hours, which were between one and five o'clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to…

— Julio Cortázar

“Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.…

— Stephen King

I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment…

— Taylor Mali

“Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French…

— Robert K. Massie

In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in…

— Isabel Allende

Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy…

— Walter Tevis

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters.…

— Richard Flanagan

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as…

— Jane Rule

“Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet,…

— Gillian Flynn

The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When…

— David O. Russell

I write about things that are really happening, serious things.

— Wilson Pickett

Inside the book between the lines, was a place to rest and absorb the magic

— Sark

The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narratives.

— Guy Maddin

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

— John Dos Passos

I feel more comfortable each time I sit down to write, but I'm determined to get better and better.

— Nayeon

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call

— Bill Walsh

Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.

— Jean Craighead George

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

— Richard Curtis

“I want to be the leading man in a story about followers.”

— Jarod Kintz

I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn't perceive my passion for books.

— Frank Delaney

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

— Samuel Johnson

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

— Lorrie Moore

I'm not as good a prose writer as I'd like to be, but I never aspired to that.

— Mark Waid

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

— Dan Harmon

A real writer [...] looks not in another writer but himself.

— Indro Montanelli

It's difficult to beat making your living thinking and writing about subjects that matter to you.

— Eleanor Holmes Norton