c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue."But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?""It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting...
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work — one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
The most difficult thing about writing
—  is writing the first line.
I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.
— Ian Hunter
Nothing leaves a scar upon an Authors heart more than a book they've written with purpose going unread.
— Mark W. Boyer
It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you've sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
As long as music survives, poetry will never die.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
— Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.
— Kingsley Amis, The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction
Ruth Cole was a novelist
—  novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.
Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him!
— John Irving, A Widow for One Year
America takes her writers too seriously.
— Kingsley Amis, The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction
Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
— Brian A. McBride
I don't want to write soft, easy fiction; I want to write fiction that challenges.
— Brian A. McBride
An unedited manuscript is a first draft of story
—  but is not a finished product. Too many writers study the craft of writing but do not acquire the skills of an editor.
This is a little secret that all writers share: We have two lives
—  the one we live on Earth and the one we live in our books.
The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
If you're frightened of the countless number of books in the library, you'll never write anything, until you close your eyes and hold the pen.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American
Each night, I close my eyes and dream. In the morning, I open my eyes again, but the dreaming doesn't stop.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Sometimes I dream so vividly, so expectantly, I wonder if I'm crazy...
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?
— E.A. Bucchianeri
I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.
— Shannon Celebi
Bootlicking is only a way to get published, not to become a writer
— Himmilicious
It's hard to be a dreamer sometimes. I'm tired.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.
— Shannon Celebi
No.'It's not a bad word. And it is very important to use at times. Practice saying it in the mirror. It's empowering.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
I am swimming in a sea of words, attempting to keep my head above water.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
I have written until I fell asleep with my computer on my lap. That can't be normal.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
You’ll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That’s when you know you’re a writer – when you take the failures and appear at the desk again, over and over again.
— Markus Zusak
The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
One man is as good as another until he has written a book.
— Benjamin Jowett, Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A. - Master Of Balliol College, Oxford
I'm not gonna lie...sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
That moment you realize you are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right reasons.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Nothing is louder than silence.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete...you feel as if you could do anything.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Give all that you can. No more. No less. Every. Single. Day.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
I write because that is what I am supposed to do.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Writers start with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.
— Robert Black
His fame as an artist requires very tender care. Look what a mask of diplomacy is painstakingly formed by the whole of that fine profile; he is as wily as a cardinal. He has scented in Miss White a useful agent of celebrity, and he has come solely to harness her to the cause of his glory. It is himself that he courts by means of the salaams he offers to her; he only ever flirts with himself. He is the Narcissus of the inkpot...
— Jean Lorrain, Monsieur De Phocas
Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
— Michel Foucault
I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.
— Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958
The expectation that TV women need to be more likeable than men is bullshit and in need of a change.
— Mindy Kaling
Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.All are continually asking, "What does this represent? What does it stand for?"They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.
— Steven Pressfield, The Authentic Swing: Notes From the Writing of a First Novel
Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You´re nostalgic!" She repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" She asked."Seventeen, " I told her."Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!
— John Irving, In One Person
When I got up this morning the sea was full of sun pennies - and now it all seems to be covered in lemon scrim. Writers ought to live far inland or next to the city dump, if they are ever to get any work one. Or perhaps they need to be stronger-minded than I am.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Harriet pushed her hair back and looked at him seriously. 'Sport, what are you going to be when you grow up?''You know what. You know I'm going to be a ball player.''Well, I'm going to be a writer. And when I say that's a mountain, that's a mountain.' Satisfied, she turned back to her town.
— Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy
A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Some writers need to sink in order to feel what their characters feel
—  in order to write their characters with the truest feeling possible. Those closest to those writers end up feeling the effects of that process. It takes a strong person to be with an emphatic writer.
As you near a finish line, do not slow down. Instead, run faster. Give all you have left until it is done. It is then that you may collapse.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.
— John Irving, In One Person
Writers should cut as close to the vein as possible. The readers don't want to be covered in your warm sticky blood, but they want to come as close to it as possible.
— Robert  Black
Don't be afraid of what you're creating.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
A writer's pen depreciates with every word that it writes. Whereas she appreciates with every word that she writes.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
What you really want is all too often hidden just behind what you think you want.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Those who can't, and can't teach, translate.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
— Mort W. Lumsden, Citations: A Brief Anthology
Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Perhaps as writers, we too should embrace the concept of wabi-sabi:
— J.A. Pak
But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation— and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity— the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
— Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus
Strong people write bad stories.
— Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People
A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up.
— John Irving, In One Person
He finished his drink. 'I don’t like mornings either,' he said. “That’s why I’m a writer.
— Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place
A witer's mind is NEVER silent. It is always conducting the next symphony of words.
— Leslie Austin
There are more writers who read than readers who write.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - then success is insanity squared!(2012 SCBWI New Member Conference; Richmond, VA)
— Brian Rock
Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Me to Comma: I will never get use to you wanting to butt your way into my sentences -- even if you're right.
— Buffy Andrews
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
— Mark Haddon
...every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word.
— Adam Langer, The Salinger Contract
Three words for a writer: Make me care.
— Buffy Andrews
As I drove out the wrought iron gates I had entered, I noticed for the first time how intricate and beautiful they were. They were forged by hand so many years ago and had stood the test of time.
— Buffy Andrews, Gina and Mike
It’s a great day to write a best-seller.
— Buffy Andrews
Grammar, you're the pickiest noun I know.
— Buffy Andrews
I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us.
— Buffy Andrews
I wear the writer pants in the family.
— Buffy Andrews
Writers don’t get time off. Every moment - waking or sleeping - a writer is working, observing, thinking and creating.
— Graeme Roberts
Do you remember the time, Mike,” Jeremy laughed, “that you put a banana down your pants and walked up to the Palma-nator. It looked like you had one hell of a hard-on.
— Buffy Andrews, Gina and Mike
It’s remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.
— Brandt Legg
Nothing on earth hurts my soul deeper than conditional love.
— Brooke Bida
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
— Umberto Eco, On Literature
Don’t ever trust anyone who’s writing a book. They make up lies for a living.
— Rosemary Clement-Moore, Texas Gothic
Writers see the world differently. Every voice we hear, every face we see, every hand we touch could become story fabric.
— Buffy Andrews
The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improve
— John Steinbeck
People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.
— William Trevor
The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
— Brandt Legg
When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
— Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters
I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.
— Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact
Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.
— Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.
— Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters
Writers strive for the impossible: perfection. Even the universe is flawed.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena
When authors write from personal experiences,straight from the heart,it touches the readers. Their work speaks out to all who read it,and most of the time,people can relate to what was written. I have always believed that books can change people's lives. Especially ones where the author is sincere,and writes deep,thoughtful,touching things from their hearts."-Nina Jean Slack
— Nina Jean Slack
Writers are compulsive liars desperately trying to tell themselves the truth.
— Anthony Marais, Delusionism
All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins.
— Anatole France
A writer’s brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It’s also full of demons, like a piñata at a birthday party in a mental hospital. The truth is, it’s demons that keep a tortured writer’s spirit alive, not Tootsie Rolls. Sure they’ll give you a tiny burst of energy, but they won’t do squat for your writing. So treat your demons with the respect they deserve, and with enough prescriptions to keep you wearing pants.
— Colin Nissan
Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing!
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
The sea of reporters on her lawn made Loretta Brooks do a double take.
— Missy Lyons, Cowboys Don't Sing
i didn't call myself a writer until everyone else did. i knew it was real then.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.
— Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of
The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us
— Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned
I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener.
— George R.R. Martin
I don't think writers need to be insane. Just crazy.
— Rayne Hall
That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud
—  and the world overhears them
The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.
— Carroll Bryant
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain
The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.
— Matthew J. Bruccoli
If God didn't want me to cross boundaries, then he wouldn't have made me a writer.
— Shannon L. Alder
The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.
— Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
All authors go to heaven
—  we have paid our dues on earth by choosing to the hellish career of writing
Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.
— Shay Youngblood, Black Girl in Paris
There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof Ihope there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am notunderstood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profoundis couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentenceis printed in a different character shall be judged to contain somethingextraordinary either of wit or sublime.
— Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.
— Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, Book Power: A Platform for Writing, Branding, Positioning & Publishing
My view on writers? We all have the same shovels, but never dig in the same places or to the exact same depth
— Carl Henegan
Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.
— Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka
I have this rage that I can't explain. It's sad.
— Peter Davis, Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!
I think. I write. I am.
— Himmilicious
I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wrote something – stories, poetry, articles, newsletters, letters. Most writers can't help themselves! It's a compulsion.
— Marina Oliver
Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.
— Eveli Acosta
all that really matters to me is that there are critics.
— Peter Davis, Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
The only way to be inclined to write is to write to your inclination.
— Terry Lander
I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden
— Kirk Douglas, Climbing The Mountain: My Search For Meaning
Most writing doesn’t take place on the page
—  it takes place in your head.
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.
— Julie Wright
Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone on a beach. God made us this way so we would know where every lighthouse can be found and tell others how to find them. We were never meant to stand on the beach with you because every rescue we do rescues ourselves. We always go back to the sea because that is where driftwood belongs--forever searching for answers to our endless questions and sharing what we learned...(2012, Writer’s Conference)
— Shannon L. Alder
I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced
— Agatha Christie, Dead Man's Folly
Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don’t let stress steal your joy.
— Sarra Cannon, Beautiful Demons
It is so small secret that many writers are also alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, or habitual wearers of blue jeans (in some cases all of the above).
— Arthur  Graham, Editorial
I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells; a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and often, when there is nothing in the world at the bottom, besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half under ground, it shall pass however for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.
— Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")
— Francis M. Nevins Jr., Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.
— Pádraic Pearse
...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;
— James M. Cain, The Butterfly
...people quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
...bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius - not the display of talent...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.
— Elaine Liner
...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Words raced thru his mind and his fingers ached to capture them all on paper.
— Eveli Acosta
People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.
— Sara Levine, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present
She had words in her heart which she released thru her fingertips.
— Eveli Acosta
You connect yourself to the viewer by by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you.
— Steven Brust
There is an audience for everything
—  our job as writers is to do the work and provide readers with a choice.
Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.
— Francis M. Nevins Jr., Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.
— Susan Larson
Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.
— Dr. Seuss
Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense?
— Rudy Francisco
I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.
— Walter Farley, The Black Stallion
The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker
—  they need it to take the edge off.
Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
— Jennifer Echols, Love Story
...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Writing isn’t necessarily a gift it is a passion. You can write a one page masterpiece to 99 pages of crap. What keeps you coming back is that Zen moment when you enlightened your own self with a few cleverly arranged words and saved yourself a $200 trip to the shrink, by simply buying a #2 pencil.
— Shannon L. Alder
To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on your feet and show the world how you survived it each time.
— Shannon L. Alder
Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.
— Philip Athans, R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen, Volume II: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection
Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.
— Brad Leithauser
She meant you have to live a story for a time.''And?''And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?''Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.''Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
In that moment, Dan was reminded why he wanted to write in the first place. It was the same reason anybody does anything -- to impress women.(Jeremy Goodwin, Sports Night)
— Aaron Sorkin
Writers, even unpublished writers, have a tendency not to notice what’s going on around them when they are the center of attention.
— Gary Reilly, Ticket To Hollywood
One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back.“Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned.“Writing for me,” Megan had typed.“I’ll write you a tea fortune.”“No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.
— L.L. Barkat
Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley’s personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical—the way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die—if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
I am the penny whistle of American literature.
— Nelson Algren
I live within my daydreams and nightmares; through that, I have learned to create, and I never cease from doing so.
— Shannon A. Thompson
You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn’t it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. “She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of the Sky
In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.So I would suggest that any attempted seduction of a writer would probably go a great deal easier for all parties if you sent them a cheerful note saying "YOU ARE INVITED TO A SEDUCTION: Please come to dinner on Friday Night, Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in."And alcohol may help, too. Or kissing. Many writers figure out that they're being seduced or flirted with if someone is actually kissing them.
— Neil Gaiman
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
— Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
We writers are resilient souls.
— Lauren DeStefano, Wither
Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
— Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions
I don't know why anyone would be scared of a homeless person. The truly scary people are all the murder mystery writers. They spend all day thinking of the perfect plot on how to kill someone and get away with it.
— Shannon L. Alder
They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.
— Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
I am a writer, I'm supposed to be intense and emotional,
— Natasha Duncan-Drake, Forbidden Soul
A writer who can't follow submission guidelines is like a pilot without a plane... ain't gonna get very far!
— Jo Linsdell
You may be a serious writer if ….10. your hard drive is littered with random notes and story ideas … but not nearly as littered as your head.9. you keep pen and paper next to your bed. And in the glove compartment. And in your gym bag. Also on the rim of the bathtub.8. a day without Roget’s Thesaurus is a day without sunshine.7. your emotional landscape includes creativity, confidence, elation, frustration, and the occasional neurosis.6. you’ve ever had to clean peanut butter and bread crumbs off your keyboard, because the work was going well, and you didn’t want to stop for lunch.5. grammar and punctuation turn you on.4. your interest in a new acquaintance is directly proportionate to his/her potential as a secondary character.3. you’ve worn the white e, r, s, and t clean off your keyboard.2. the search history on your web browser would raise red flags with the FBI, CIA, DEA, and mental health professionals everywhere.1. you have stories to tell, and you just. Keep. Telling. Them.
— Kathy Disanto
To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.
— Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
— Angeline M. Bishop
Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral
I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
— Angeline M. Bishop
Some writers may never create a work. Their purpose is to help others create their first word.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted."Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...""What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh."Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity.""A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.
— P.D. James, Unnatural Causes
Falling in love with a writer is a dangerous thing, isn't it? The only thing you get out of it sometimes is immortality.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Do Engineers have stories, Jack?" he asked. "What?" Jack said, without moving."Stories. Myths. Things to keep the boredom out on a long shift.""I think they play cards, mostly," Jack answered. It was a lie, but he told it with surprising deftness; not a waver in his voice or a hesitation in his words. Only the tightening of his shoulders told Ellis he was lying.
— Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle
My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
— Michelle Geaney
...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
— David Rakoff, Half Empty
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
— W.H. Auden
If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.
— Jamie Anne Royce
I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
— Roman Payne