Writer Quotes · Page 585

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

— Ernest Hemingway

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

— Mary Roberts Rinehart

people never write calmly but when they write indifferently.

— Mary Wortley Montagu

There can never be enough writers anywhere in the world.

— Zakes Mda

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

— Colson Whitehead

“Books are just one blink you go there and you come back.”

— Deyth Banger

“Books are majical. With books we can be anyone, go everywhere, and do anything.”

— Brenda Tetreault

“The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defence.”

— John Alfred Langford

Generations of thinkers have made typewriters their frenemies, and long before there were Gmail inboxes, print correspondence stacked up, some hastily written…

— Mary Pilon

Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I haven't found it to be particularly enjoyable... ninety percent of the time when I go on dates, I'm thinking, 'I could…

— Zosia Mamet

“The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.”

— Hilary Mantel

I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn't have a clue about women, but…

— Donna Leon

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden…

— Michel de Montaigne

“One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest…

— Madeleine L'Engle

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply…

— Alexander Theroux

As I considered Parker and his absurdist reflection in the Westlake-authored 'Dortmunder' novels, I wrote, 'His natural ability to observe human behavior…

— Sarah Weinman

I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies…

— Dean Koontz

“But don’t you think there some stories that are more alive than that? When you put certain books back on the shelf,…

— Kristin Kladstrup

“Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The…

— Anna Quindlen

Additionally, Liesl and Po is the embodiment of what writing has always been for me at its purest and most basic--not a…

— Lauren Oliver

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and…

— Emile Zola

I think I told my parents I wanted to be a writer, just so they'd kind of think I had some direction…

— Kyle Kinane

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come…

— Taiye Selasi

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

— Virginia Woolf

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

— V. S. Pritchett

“If you are talking about beauty, books are cheaper than cosmetics.”

— Svaradiva

“Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

— Jules Renard 1890

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

— Mark Twain

“Literature is not an instruction manual. For obvious reasons, this is rarely noted in fiction.”

— Charles Baxter

Tour isn't good for writing, but it's good for inspiration.

— Mitski

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

— E. L. Doctorow

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

— Christopher Hitchens

“Great writers speak with their works not with their mouths!”

— Mehmet Murat ildan

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

— Franz Kafka

Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions.

— Sheila Heti

I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.

— Margaret Mitchell

I was afraid that not even Merlin the Enchanter could transform me into a writer.

— Lloyd Alexander

It's just hard," Harry said finally, in a low voice, "to realize he won't write me again

— Anonymous