Writer Quotes · Page 299

“Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina" when asked the three best novels of all time.”

— William Faulkner

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.

— Jeet Thayil

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

— Helen Dunmore

“At its loftiest, a library's goal is to keep as many minds as possible in the game ...”

— Josh Hanagarne

I just write the way I feel, and if it feels good to me, hopefully everybody likes it.

— David Bryan

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

— Oscar Wilde

Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?

— Wallace Shawn

To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still…

— Tom Wolfe

One of the reasons writers are never satisfied with their work is because they're always striving to do better.

— JoAnn Ross

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

— Will Self

I worry that I use writing as therapy too much actually, which can inspire great authenticity and verve but I do wish…

— Katy Wix

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we…

— Umberto Eco

Although I long to get away from the typewriter, if I think I can produce a better opening or a better closing…

— Catherine Gaskin

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a…

— Paul Theroux

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult…

— Catherine Fisher

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they…

— Charles Kingsley

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It…

— Jennifer Gilmore

The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is…

— Eric Burns

Being a writer, writing for a living, is one long persistence game. Everyone wants you to quit. Quite often, you want to…

— Kameron Hurley

I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed…

— David Nicholls

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other…

— John Irving

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations,…

— Michel Foucault

He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His…

— A. E. Hotchner

“Nobody knows he's a writer. It's other people who tell you.”

— Joël Dicker

I hate that not everything ever written is on iBooks. Man, I hate paper.

— Penn Jillette

As life tends to become more and more distracting, let us firmly hold on to books.

— A. Edward Newton

I envy them, those monks of old; Their books they read, and their beads they told.

— George Payne Rainsford James

If I don't get the goose-bump factor when I'm reading it than I can't do it.

— Russell Crowe

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

— William Faulkner

There are books that inspired me the first time round and re-reading them just reignites that.

— Edith Bowman

Writing in my journal keeps me focused on my spirit and what I need or feel.

— Alicia Keys

“When I write my only difficulty is to be able to stop”

— MBarreto Condado

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.

— Cyril Connolly

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

— Haruki Murakami

Let my temptation be a book, which I shall purchase, hold and keep.

— Eugene Field

A lot of books in the self-help section of your bookstore really belong in the fiction section.

— Steve Maraboli

“When you are a writer, you can daydream all day and yet claim that you're working.”

— Dodong Charing

“The best tool in a writer's arsenal is a reader's imagination.”

— Tim Campbell

I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.

— Mo Willems