For Writers Quotes

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

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.

I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.

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

Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.

Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense?

You connect yourself to the viewer by by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you.

Those who can't, and can't teach, translate.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story

Writers see the world differently. Every voice we hear, every face we see, every hand we touch could become story fabric.

Nothing on earth hurts my soul deeper than conditional love.

It’s remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.

Writers don’t get time off. Every moment - waking or sleeping - a writer is working, observing, thinking and creating.

...every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word.

To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.

There are more writers who read than readers who write.

A witer's mind is NEVER silent. It is always conducting the next symphony of words.

He finished his drink. 'I don’t like mornings either, ' he said. “That’s why I’m a writer.

That's okay, " I said. "We're writers. We make things up.

A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.

Strong people write bad stories.

Perhaps as writers, we too should embrace the concept of wabi-sabi:

Writers start with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.

Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.

No.'It's not a bad word. And it is very important to use at times. Practice saying it in the mirror. It's empowering.

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

That moment you realize you are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Nothing is louder than silence.

A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.

What you really want is all too often hidden just behind what you think you want.

A writer's pen depreciates with every word that it writes. Whereas she appreciates with every word that she writes.

Writers should cut as close to the vein as possible. The readers don't want to be covered in your warm sticky blood, but they want to come as close to it as possible.

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.