Writer Quotes · Page 418

It's weird, because I don't feel prolific. I don't write anything for months at a time.

— Richard Greenberg

“Anyone who writes can be called a writer because they write.”

— Dejan Stojanovic

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

— William Blake

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?

— Alexander Pope

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

— Roald Dahl

I read a lot of 'Nancy Drew' books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective.

— Chelsea Cain

“They scribble on notepads, the sound of their pens scratching the judgemental air.”

— Emma Cameron

Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.

— Peter Bichsel

to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a…

— Pearl S. Buck

“On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?”

— David Morrell

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

— Milan Kundera

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the…

— John Ralston Saul

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going…

— Rose Tremain

“…found the use of actual old-school books off putting, but over time, he'd learned there was something very satisfying to the turning…

— Neal Shusterman

Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more…

— Barry N. Malzberg

When you're writing about someone feeling so isolated and so lonely, when the making of it becomes collaborative, that's a special thing.

— Eva Victor

“In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable... The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most…

— John Steinbeck

“To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests…

— Terry Eagleton

I can write anywhere really. I have a hard time writing when the birds are tweeting and the brooks are running outside.…

— James McBride

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that…

— John Updike

“Writing has been sewn into my soul and I'm afraid my thoughts have no choice but to be the truth to the…

— Amber M. Royse

“I have no idea what will happen when I write. One night I wrote effortlessly for hours, churning out one brilliant paragraph…

— Rich Ritter

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your…

— Tom Robbins

“Before I was born she had bought herself a new home health care book. It was large and expensive, and it was…

— Marilynne Robinson

Good writing is formed partly through plan and partly through accident.

— Ken Macrorie

Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

— Stephen King

Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them.

— Tara Bray Smith

I'm always writing, the past 10 years. A lot has changed, in that it's something I do every day.

— PJ Harvey

I have never read for entertainment, but rather for understanding and to satisfy my eager curiosity.

— Bryant H. McGill

I can't even say I've begun yet, but I'm trying on the idea that there is a book in my future.

— Kathy Mattea

“Books give you explanations that you must unravel over time.”

— Mahayla Bainter

Just because you're an avid reader doesn't mean you're an avid understander.

— Alec Sulkin

A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.

— Pierre Beaumarchais

“The Writer and Poet is excusable only if he is Successful. Makes Money.” Within”

— Linda Wagner-Martin

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

— Salman Rushdie

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

— James J. Corbett

An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

— Doris Lessing

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

— E. L. Doctorow

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

— Terry Pratchett

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

— Orhan Pamuk