Writers Quotes

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.

It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing.

I used to forget that I was an Indian woman. I would even forget that I was a woman. I don't think of myself as bringing to the table a lot of 'women's issues.' I don't feel the need to write about maternity. I grew up thinking that the talented people in comedy were hard-joke writers.

I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.

You could name the great stars of the silent screen who were finished; the great directors gone; the great title writers who were washed up. But remember this, as long as you live: the producers didn't lose a man. They all made the switch. That's where the great talent is.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

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.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.