Writers Quotes

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

Mystery writers' conventions are usually good, and this one has been excellent and extremely well prepared and thought out in advance. A lot of people have given their time and their skill, and a good deal of wit, and Anchorage has made us extraordinarily welcome.

Comedy writers have the most fragile egos.

It's a marvellous life, a gregarious life that we've had. We're very lucky in that way. Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?'

Most writers can write, most rock 'n rollers cannot.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!

I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.

Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.

So I made a request. I said to the writers, I have a minor request that I just want to play a loser.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I'm interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We're all victims and few of us are truly free.

Our great American writers were all newspaper people.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me.

Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Writers have told me more than once that I'm a better interview in defeat than in victory, which is a compliment I am extremely proud of.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

I think what I would say to my younger self, and probably to younger, just starting-out writers is that a lot of times you're just afraid to put yourself out there, and it's uncomfortable because it's working up the courage to do something, to push yourself to do those things.