For Writers Quotes

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

I don't consider myself a great writer, but I would like to think that I can at least proof- read.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

To aspiring writers, I say : Don't give up. Storytelling has been an integral part of the human condition since the beginning of time. Don't let anyone tell you your dreams don't have value. They do.

Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely.

My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various

I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer.

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn’t play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.

A good writer writes with a camera, not a pen.

The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

Great writers zealously learn the craft of their profession so they can release the power and the depth of their imagination and experience.