Quotes About Writers

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called. 
”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks

“great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.

good human beings save the world
so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead
it means I made it.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
― Cornelia Funke

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.

This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
― Maya Angelou

“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

“Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.”
― George R.R. Martin

“When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Ain't She Sweet

“A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.”
― Tom Bissell

“Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.”
― J.K. Rowling

“You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.”
― Orson Scott Card

“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”
― Margaret Chittenden

“A novelist can’t be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)”
― Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket, Vol. 1

“Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about a thousand words from a rambler vs. 500 words from Mark Twain? He could say the same thing quicker and with more force than almost any other writer. One thousand words from Ginsberg are not even worth one from Wilde. It’s wild to declare the equivalency of any picture with any army of 1,000 words. Words from a writer like Wordsworth make you appreciate what words are worth. 
”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks

“Writers write while dreamers procastinate. ”
― Besa Kosova

“Writers will happen in the best of families.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“If writers write, then rangers range. And I’d like to wake up every morning and be a mother, so I could eat my own clothes.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley