Writer Quotes - page 3

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. View quote
Simone de Beauvoir
I was never a quick writer, but composed with great care and efforts. View quote
Joseph Haydn
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer. View quote
Isaac Bashevis Singer
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. View quote
Quentin Crisp
It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied. View quote
Manuel Puig
As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward. View quote
Augusten Burroughs
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. View quote
Peter De Vries
As a writer, I am not goddess of the universes I create. I am at most a stage manager of the plentiful gifts which tumble out of the horn of plenty, which is to say there is a source so sweet and forgiving and generous that I pray every day to let that source be my guide. View quote
Rebecca Wells
I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do. View quote
Richard Price
The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it. (Alain Robbe-Grillet)
Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship. View quote
Ismail Kadaré
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him. View quote
Mel Brooks
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. View quote
John Updike
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, ''How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style'' and avoid ''How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece'' View quote
James Thurber
Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,imported by Madame de Stal, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,'Providence has given to the French the empire of the land to the English that of the sea to the Germans that ofthe air' Richter German humorist prose writer. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them. View quote
Carlos Fuentes
Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre. (Carlos Fuentes)
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn. View quote
Robert Frost
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. View quote
Robert Frost
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say. View quote
Raymond Chandler
If you wish to be a writer, write. View quote
Epictetus