For Writers Quotes

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

I love seeing the light go on in aspiring writers' eyes when you point out ways to improve their prose or their story - when they get it.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

I think that money is devoted to serious journalism, with analysis, interestingly presented, by good writers can still sell newspapers.

Whenever young writers ask me for advice, I always say you have to be able to take a lot of rejection because, unless you're very lucky, that's what's going to happen.

I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

I am not a writer, but I feel that when our production company is successful, we'll be able to give some young writers with fresh voices an opportunity to put their work out there.

I regard posterity as vulgar as success. I don't trust posterity. I don't think what's good is necessarily recognized in the long run. Too many good writers have disappeared.

Some of the best fiction writers got their start writing airline menus.

Bucky Katt: A bad writer is just a good writer with writer's block.

Every artist takes their final work to the grave.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.

I want to paint the way a bird sings.

I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.

The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs.

The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.

You are your own best teacher. ~Jimmy Buffett

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves.

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.

The truth is that most writers are needy.

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

There is but one art to omit.

Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.

I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.

When an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance and when he is dead we rate them by his best.