Writer Quotes · Page 473

I write in Urdu and everything is written by my hand.

— Gulzar

If you don't write the book, the book ain't gonna get written.

— Tom Clancy

I write a lot in my head. I've never been driven to write things down.

— Edward P. Jones

When you're writing, you're demented, alone, and full of doubt. It feels dangerous.

— Joan Juliet Buck

Learn about writing from reading. That is the right way to do it.

— Maxwell Perkins

I don't believe in writing for goals, or else I'd write essays.

— Tom King

“those who do read fiction are better able to understand the emotions of others.”

— Terry Marselle

Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.

— Alice Mattison

Often I have the impression that I am writing on paper that is already browning in the licks of the flames.

— Ernst Junger

“Reading is like cooking. It can take hours to prepare, and then the meal is over in minutes. Good, that means you’ve…

— Gabe Berman

In places where people read hardcover books and eat sushi, they're not signing a five-year-old up to tackle another five-year-old.

— Chris Borland

“You can read until you’re blue in the face, but I’d recommend writing until you’re red in the face. And ass.”

— Jarod Kintz

For my money, there are no more fascinating, hard-working, vulnerable creatures on earth than writers. Every day, they lay their souls out…

— Faith Sullivan

I love what I call "re-imagining," where I throw everything up in the air and let it fall in a different way.…

— Megan Chance

Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.

— George Bernard Shaw

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop…

— M. H. Abrams

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

There is nothing so charming as the knowledge of literature; of that branch of literature, I mean, which enables us to discover…

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

I'm imagining that paper books will evolve to become something akin to candles we have them in our homes and cherish their…

— Steve Leveen

“I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the…

— Julie Tetel Andresen

“It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one…

— Sōseki Natsume

“Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. “If the water is dark,” goes a German…

— Paul J. Silvia

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of…

— Dionne Brand

Never far from a dining table, the characters in Heather A. Slomski's limpid and elegant debut collection are not given to melodramatics.…

— Jaimy Gordon

I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.

— Melvyn Bragg

“An insightful book possesses the ability to speak to you”

— I.R. Shankar

I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine, never seen an operation

— Taylor Caldwell

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

— John Cheever

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

— Philip Larkin

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

— Graham Greene

“It is noble to write as one thinks; this is the privilege of humanity.”

— Voltaire

A novel is not just a work of art: It is somehow a work of life as well.

— George P Elliott

Words about Lincoln fill a small but ever-growing library.

— Fred Kaplan

You really can't write well if you're thinking about what the reviewers might say.

— A.M. Homes

“Writers of historical fiction would be lost without libraries and archives.”

— Ruta Sepetys

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

— Aaron Sorkin

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.

— Guy Kawasaki

The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write; it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies.

— Taika Waititi

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

— DeRay Mckesson

“Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say...”

— Aldous Huxley