Writer Quotes · Page 569

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at. What I see and what I fear.

— Joan Didion

“Writing isn't black magic. You just have to come up with an idea...”

— Karl Ove Knausgård

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.

— Anonymous

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

— Rose Tremain

“Whenever I see a grammatical error in my writing I feel like I'm standing in Central Park naked.”

— Rae

The more interesting the 9-to-5 work is, the more it takes away from my real work, which is writing.

— Judith Rossner

“The seed of our love will always cube within the wonder of infinite.”

— robert m drake

“Any one could write a book," said the taxi driver. "Yes, they could, but they DON'T," said Maeve Binchy”

— Maeve Binchy

I've just always written, and always considered myself a writer. I wrote my first story when I was five. There was nothing…

— Jami Attenberg

I love reading. I spend a huge amount of time travelling on planes and have always got a book on the go.

— Ben Fogle

I wrote 'Channel Orange' in two weeks. The end product wasn't always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

— Frank Ocean

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

— Joe Queenan

Vacation reading is not a new concept. Ever since the 19th century, when novels were considered relatively sinful indulgences, leisure and fiction-reading…

— Michelle Dean

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

— Alfred Hitchcock

I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don't edit myself out of existence, meaning I'll try to write 50 or…

— Anthony Bourdain

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is…

— Jeanette Winterson

I like writing books. I'd rather be at home with my wife. I can write, take a break, come out, have a…

— Gene Wilder

[Noah Hawley] just a fantastic writer. It's always about the script, it's always about the book; it always is. If it ain't…

— Lauren Shuler Donner

I am driven by love and I have been in love with a handful of different people, men and women. It's like,…

— Nico Tortorella

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I am very, very old-fashioned and clumsy. I use those long reporter notebooks. This is what a troglodyte I am. The night…

— David Quammen

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I…

— Jennifer Egan

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough…

— Stanley Kunitz

“one of the keys to writing is to live a life worth writing about.”

— Anonymous

I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter.

— Amitava Kumar

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

— Walter Savage Landor

This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.

— Dorothy Parker

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

— Thomas Carlyle

You can write a book on how to ruin someone’s perfect day.

— Taylor Swift

Saturday night is perfect for writers because other people have "plans.

— Mike Birbiglia

“When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.”

— Sara Sheridan

The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me.

— Bruce Cockburn

“What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.”

— Edith Wharton

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“...books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought.”

— Lawrence Durrell

If I can steal away and read something other than what I have to for my work, it's restorative.

— Roma Downey

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.

— Karin Fossum

It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.

— Lytton Strachey

I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.

— Patti Smith