For Writers Quotes

All good writers across the board, if they're dealing with real tragedy, they will give you comedy in it. And if they're dealing with real comedy, there will be tragic moments in it.

We lost so many talented artists and writers from the generations before ours that we're really lacking older figureheads.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

Young writers should definitely research the current sounds and styles.

I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

The bottom line is that female writers aren't being given enough opportunities by male producers.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

Young writers take themselves very seriously in college.

For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.

Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.

I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

He was so good at everything he did. You can't call Ronnie Barker a comedian. He was an actor, and a great writer.

Good writers touch life often.

Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today.

I learned that famous writers are people with foibles like anyone else and this helped me realize reaching their level of notoriety wasn't impossible.

I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.

The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.

Many fiction writers who put the science in dont get it right.

All good writers are sensitive to clichés and endeavor to avoid them

Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

If professional religious leaders can [no longer] instruct..., our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.

Mary Jo Putney is a gifted writer with an intuitive understanding of what makes romances work. I loved Silk and Shadows, couldn't put it down, and don't think readers will, either.

Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious traveller. . .who always proportions his stay in any place.

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

I'm not a very good writer. I'm working at it.

I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at

There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts.

I have only one bit of advice to beginning writers: be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.

All great writers begin with a good leather binding and a respectable title.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.

I think fiction writers write what they do because no one else has written it and they want to read it.

A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

Most writers write to say something about other people - and it doesn't last. Good writers write to find out about themselves - and it lasts forever.

Be persistent. Editors change; tastes change; editorial markets change. Too many beginning writers give up too easily.

A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time.