Writer Quotes · Page 640

I was once in love with books. Now they go their way and I go mine.

— Mason Cooley

“Many writers were better before they became famous.”

— Dejan Stojanovic

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

— Calvin Trillin

I'm not a writer. As for direction, I don't have the guts to do that. Still you can never say never.

— Akshaye Khanna

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

— Janet Fitch

If people didn't read books on the subway, underground journeys would be dreary.

— Russell Smith

Why do I write? The truth, the unvarnished truth, is that I haven't a clue.

— Gloria Naylor

Unless I write every day, I don't feel I deserve my dinner.

— Charlie Chaplin

I would consider my diary serves the same purpose as going for a walk or a run. They are all physical ways…

— Chet Faker

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to…

— Brenda Ueland

Fiction is just that-fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It's entertainment. It's escapism.…

— Anonymous

reading a good book in silence is like eating chocolate for the rest of your life and never getting fat.

— Becca Fitzpatrick

I'm a great planner, so before I ever write chapter 1, I work out what happens in every chapter and who the…

— Ken Follett

I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to…

— John Edgar Wideman

Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.

— Leslie Marmon Silko

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

In the glory days of Orioles, when I was a newbie baseball writer for the Post, the roster of talkers was as…

— Jane Leavy

I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock…

— Clive Cussler

“I lose myself in the fiction I write in the same way I would lose myself as a younger man in the…

— Daniel Kemp

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler…

— Charles Frazier

My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. I had some…

— Anne Lamott

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a…

— Haruki Murakami

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and…

— Tahir Shah

Not so, however, with books, for books cannot change. A thousand years hence they are what you find them to-day, speaking the…

— Eugene Field

I've always been a fan of plain writing. I hate metaphor-laden, heavily larded, lyrical writing.

— Hank Azaria

Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.

— Elizabeth David

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

— Evan Davis

fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.

— Isabel Allende

As a performer and writer, the sillier or more charactery sketches come way more naturally to me.

— Heidi Gardner

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

— Terry Tempest Williams

There is no more important foundational skill than reading.

— Neil Bush

I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does

— Julio Cortazar

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.

— Michael Connelly

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

— Amy Tan

The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.

— Alex Tizon

“The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.”

— John Gardner

“To find the best authors,” he boasted, “is like being able to tell good wine without the labels.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

— Thomas Lennon

For as long as writers have written, they've had second thoughts about their work.

— Maria Konnikova

“The problem with being an author in this modern world is such: computers break often; books don't”

— Emma Iadanza