Writer Quotes · Page 505

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

— Wallace Stegner

Most of the time, we write something and then figure out who would be best to do it.

— Tim Heidecker

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

— Eudora Welty

Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection.

— Michael Dirda

Some of the greatest writers in our industry can't get work.

— Kent McCord

The world is a book. Some words stand out from the page.

— Mike Carey

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

— Anne Enright

Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.

— Benjamin Carson

“If you become a writer you'll be trying to describe the ?Thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of…

— C.S. Lewis

I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I…

— Douglas Coupland

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I…

— John Jeremiah Sullivan

I am generally wary of the demand for 'likeability' in fiction, which I think is a bastardisation of the demand of identification…

— Katie Kitamura

Shera's Two Laws of Cataloging: Law #1, No cataloger will accept the work of any other cataloger. Law #2: No cataloger will…

— Jesse Shera

[Preface to second edition:] ... I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex…

— Anne Bronte

I haven't been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you're more likely to…

— Gloria Steinem

SPOOKER, n. A writer whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks.

— Ambrose Bierce

If I write a paragraph and I don't get a certain lift from it, if I don't feel connected to it emotionally,…

— Oscar Hijuelos

In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great…

— Natalie Goldberg

Prior to 1980, people used to dictate to a secretary for preparing written documents and that person would then punch keys on…

— Shiva Ayyadurai

My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to…

— Vladimir Nabokov

"The Diagnosis" is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it... there was so much I wanted to…

— Alan Lightman

Aberjhani's writing blows the mind and frees the psyche of any rigid assumptions about ancestral heritage. Here, our collective experience is starkly…

— Rosy Cole

Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the…

— Katherine Paterson

“What was the point of all this? Flying all over Norway to read for ten minutes to four people? Talking smugly about…

— Karl Ove Knausgård

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

— Jules Renard

Each book requires a different kind of treatment and structural gambit.

— Colson Whitehead

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be.

— Maurice Sendak

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

The public library is the most dangerous place in town

— John Ciardi

“If you don't love what you write, then nobody's going to enjoy reading it.”

— T.A. Uner

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

— Joan Didion

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them…

— Zadie Smith

I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

— Rob Reiner

I believe with books as with money, you dont loan you get.

— Elizabeth Mitchell

This is not about money or anything other than the pleasure of reading for people who want to read it.

— J. K. Rowling

I'm glad I have a story to tell. It's unique, it's mine, and I'm blessed to have it.

— Chris Harris, Jr

Writing on 'Love' is so steeped in self-analysis. The writer's room can feel like therapy.

— Paul Rust

No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.

— Elif Batuman

“Love paints the heart so delicate; so why would my words ever borrow the ink of their own demise?”

— Laura Chouette