Writer Quotes · Page 385

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.

— John Steinbeck

“The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.”

— Blaise Pascal

“I am still more or less sane because of my evening reading.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“Tricky devils, these novelists. The ink gets into their heads.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

All good children's books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.

— Duane Michals

I think thats the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

— Maria Semple

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.—George Bernard Shaw”

— Jan Karon

“Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas.”

— Criss Jami

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble…

— Jay Asher

Writers - we're a little crazy about how much we care about it. We spend a lot of time fussing. At least,…

— Gloria Steinem

“Sometimes when you read, it’s like certain sentences strike home and knock you flat. It’s as if they say everything you have…

— Gunnhild Øyehaug

I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of…

— Matt de la Pena

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place…

— Louise Erdrich

“What reading does...is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequenced of lived moments, but a destiny.”

— Sven Birkerts

“You can tell almost as much about a person by what kinds of books they haven't read as you can by those…

— Michael E. Weil

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none…

— Rachel Kushner

“For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

“Books. I am attracted and repelled; books are conversations that are not addressed to me and I want to sneak up and…

— Helen Oyeyemi

There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the…

— H. G. Wells

Solitude. It is way underrated in our world of writing. We stay busy. We act busy. We thrive on busy. The truth…

— Bonnie Baker

“That the public library is a part of the educational system should never be lost sight of in the work of establishing…

— John Cotton Dana

Every writer dreams of having the ability to hold forth for 8,000 words and pull all these different forms together: history, reportage,…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes…

— Garth Stein

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of…

— Ross Macdonald

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

— Ann Beattie

I was born a writer. When that happens, you have no choice in the matter.

— Gore Vidal

I kind of have my little OCD wood shed at my house where everything is just right when I go write.

— Sam Hunt

“People are the same except for the books they read and the people they meet”

— Charlie Jones

I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

— Joseph O'Neill

The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

— Tony Hillerman

“First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.”

— Martin Myers

The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity...

— A. Edward Newton

“I sometimes think I prefer suitors in books rather than right in front of me.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

“❝ fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.❞”

— dorothy allison

If life ever stops inspiring us to write, it's time to stop doing what we do.

— Emily Saliers

I never work on a computer. I can't write on a computer. It's just not possible for me to do that.

— James Ivory

Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.

— Peter Greenaway

“The best kind of writing is that in which imagination has free reign in the wilds of your mind.”

— ChristaCarol Jones

With a book, there's no volume to turn up. You're very naked with a book.

— Henry Rollins

When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.

— Curtis Sittenfeld