Quotes About Writers

Writing is not a great profession as a lot of writers proclaim. I write because this is something I can do. Another thing—very often I think a lot of writers write because they have failed to do other things. How many writers can’t drive? A lot. They’re not practical. They are not capable in everyday life.

Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

I don't know a lot of writers, even writers who have been on the bestseller list for a few weeks, or writers who have gotten movie options, who can live on just their writing income. Once you break it down to the years it took to write the book, place it, promote it, and you pay the agent, pay the taxes, the annual income is not enough to live on comfortably. I do not have a starving artist inclination. I'm from the working class. I don't feel creative unless I feel like my house is going to be there and I'm going to be fed. I can't worry about money and write. Maybe some people can.

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.

I can't lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

I feel that there are two kinds of writers. I feel that there are writers who are storytellers and then there are those just working out their obsessions. I think I'm a combination. I think, at least for these books, I'm going with fear. I've always been interested in fear. Fear is something I've dealt with in life, and I think it's the main motivating factor of everything, almost. From sex to politics.

I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

I value my correspondence with writers...I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him - he is someone I really like. I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That's enough for me.

I get to meet writers, and I love writers.

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories...The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.

Of course, I don't mean to imply that all writers are working in the deep waters that border on the divine. Most writers are just trying to pay the bills, like anyone else - Stephanie Meyers is the literary equivalent of a television evangelist. Fork over twenty bucks and she'll help you forget your troubles for a while. I certainly don't fault her for her success, but I hope she has no illusions about the quality of her craft or the longevity of her efforts.

I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.

It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

Howard University holds something called "Heart's Day," an all day ceremony in which a writer is honored. I was the recipient of this honor. It's a wonderful ceremony that Eleanor Traylor chair of English at Howard University organizes for writers. Writers from around the country came to pay tribute to my work. It was very flattering.

I just can't say enough about the actors having faith and trust in the writers and the writers having faith and trust in the actors.

Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.

I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. [...] The other problem I have is fear of writing. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. [...] Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. [...] It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.

Writers' communities are very helpful to writers because it gives them a way to try out their stuff short of publication.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund's goal is to produce a broad range of investigative journalism created by both staff reporters and freelance writers, with a focus on working with the many experienced reporters and writers impacted by the economic contraction. The pieces will range from long-form investigations to short breaking news stories and will be presented in a variety of media - including text, audio, and video.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.

On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

I suppose most writers are following Twain's advice to tackle what they know, and my own readings habits drew me to writers who seemed to be writing honestly from their own experiences, whether they presented it in the guise of fiction or not.

I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies - as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.

One of my favorite pieces of advice about being a writer came from a very formative teacher I had as an undergraduate, named John Hersey. On our last day of class together, which was also John Hersey last day before retirement, he said, "Remember, the world doesn't need any new writers." Which at first didn't seem like great advice, but when you unpacked it, it was really that it's not enough to be confident in what you do; be conscious of bringing something to the world of readers and writers that it hasn't seen before. Something idiosyncratic.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing.

The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.

The work I'm doing on the screen differs from that of anyone else. My comedy is of a peculiar nature...no writers have been developed along the lines of my type of comedy and this is why I sometimes have differences with writers, supervisors and directors alike.

I don't know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I've eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than 'Pass the salt' or 'If you're not going to eat that, can I have it?'

That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said - it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

Television is certainly a writers-led medium. They're the ones who are there, they're the ones that are conferencing or whatever, with directors coming and going.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.

Maybe I've been a small part of the democratisation of celebrity, because I've been fascinated by it, and when it started to happen to me to the very limited extent that it happens to writers in North America, I was exposed to people who had the disease of celebrity. People who had raging, raging, life-threatening celebrity, people who would be in danger if they were left alone on the street without their minders. It's a great anthropological privilege to be there.