c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I need the money, people are very coy about money, and the ladies arent just coy, they are sci fi about money……people ask, well, dont sweet things happen? yes, indeed, many sweet things, but sweet doesnt keep you from dying, making love doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, writing doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, being wise doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, facts are facts, being poor makes you face facts which also does not keep you from dying.
— Andrea Dworkin
People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth.
— Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates
Misery and poverty of a nation is associated with the conscious of its people not leaders.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Everyday 25,000 people die from poverty and hunger. And we have forgotten that they are also human.
— M.F. Moonzajer
May we show great concern to those of great concern to God.
— Dillon Burroughs, Hunger No More: A 1-Year Devotional Journey Through the Psalms
Whose boys are those with the holes in their pants?"I cringed. How would my grandpa answer such an embarrassing question?"Those are my daughter's children, my grandchildren," Grandpa spoke as if he'd just been asked who had won first place in a foot race or just been baptized into the church."Those pants are very well ironed," the stranger said.
— Elizabeth Byler Younts, Seasons: A Real Story of an Amish Girl
The poor are not a problem but rather an opportunity to show unconditional love.
— Dillon Burroughs
I heard the voice of that bird, son of Polypas, whose piercing outcryand whose arrival announces to men the season when fieldsare plowed, and the voice of her broke the heart that darkens within me,since other men posess my flourishing acres now,and not for me are the mules dragging the plow through the grainland,since I have given my heart to the restless seafarer's life.
— Theognis
Through silent alleys where dark shadows fleeted past them like forest beasts on the prowl; through bustling market-places where bloaters predominated, into crammed gin-palaces where the gas flashed over faces whereon was stamped the indelible impression of a protest against creation; brushing tatters which were in gruesome harmony with the haggard or bloated features.("The Phantom Model
— Hume Nisbet, Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others
Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it’s easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It’s much harder—and much more needful—to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy.
— David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in.
— Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Poverty was not created by God. It is we who have caused it, you and I through our egotism.
— Mother Teresa
The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?
— Christa Wolf, City of Angels or Overcoat of Dr. Freud
Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.
— Bob Torres, Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights
The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
I've never heard anyone come back from downtown Baltimore waxing poetic about the authenticity of poverty.
— Lisa Samson, The Sky Beneath My Feet
A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted.
— Mother Teresa
Thus God's work and His eyes are in the depths, but man's only in the height.
— Martin Luther, Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat
The handholds for hope are there for all of us but are made plainest to those in poverty, for whom survival actually depends on hope in their God.
— Wess Stafford, Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
The wilderness was the testing ground—the deciding place. It was a place of God revealing himself in a whole new and deeper way. Would his people trust him completely, confident in his goodness, wisdom, and power? Those who believed God to be who he said he was moved on into the promised land; many did not.
— Amy Layne Litzelman
My honey child, them housing projects Cannot contain her multitudes A sunbeam, hard upon her Just a fly strugglin’ through her braid loops Watch me prove to ‘em I’m more than nothin’ But a ragamuffin with homesick eyes Yes, when it gets to be the same old thing Shorty you ought to come and see about me My love, she is a drummer Than industrial steel, her backbone tougher The eloping night and the honey moon that trails Just dirt ‘neath her finger nails I’ll be down on them crossroads ‘Til daybreak winks a bright eye And if it gets to be the same old thing Shorty you ought to come and see about me She’s heard all the right things And they did not persuade her She has no use for your words What she wants is your labor ‘Cause when gringos speak of minorities They tend to keep their voices low Ah, but when that gets to be the same old thing Shorty you ought to come and see about me
— Valentine Xavier
The presence of even a single poor child on the street means a million defeats for mankind.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
When it comes to poverty, there is no need to say anything. All we need to do is to help, the moment we encounter it.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
For a man who is in poverty, doomsday is already there!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Do you find yourself in a dry place today? Don’t look back toward the land of your bondage, or even to the place where God miraculously saved you from your enemies. Those seasons are over and he is now offering you a great opportunity. He is longing to reveal his sovereignty to you by providing for you in this most hot and dry place.
— Amy Layne Litzelman
A big hole in a poor child’s shoe is the simplest evidence to condemn the society he lives in.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Poverty is a mathematical proof of the fact that mankind is a big failure!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Measured in terms of the World Bank poverty standard, the number of poor people in China fell from 652 million to 135 million between 1981 and 2004 - in other words, more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty. The number of poor people in the developing world as a whole declined by only 400 million over the same period. In other words, but for China, there would have been an increase in the number of poor people in the developing world. No wonder a World Bank report said that "a fall in the number of poor of this magnitude over such a short period is without historical precedent.
— Wang Shaoguang
You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty.
— Mother Teresa
It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor... the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.
— Aristotle
Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.
— Bruce Robinson, Withnail and I: the Original Screenplay
We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won
— Ronald Reagan
We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side.
— Abhijit V. Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something we do only in comparison to others.
— Eric Greitens, The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL
I love living in the ghetto!" #PoorMindSet
— Habeeb Akande
He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not frivolously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them “where they stand”.He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments against giving money to beggars. But he finds those to be precisely the arguments for giving money to them. If beggars are lazy or deceptive or wanting a drink, he knows only too well his own lack of motivation, his own dishonesty, his own thirst.He doesn’t believe in “scientific charity” because that is too easy, as easy as writing a check. He believes in “promiscuous charity” because that is really difficult. “It means the most dark and terrible of all human actions—talking to a man. In fact, I know of nothing more difficult than really talking to the poor men we meet.” (pp. 13-14)
— Dale Ahlquist, Common Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton
Don’t let affluence make you impoverished of God.
— Jon Bloom
Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.
— Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone
You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you've never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. ("Dusk To Dawn")
— Cornell Woolrich
Believe me I do understand and I am disgusted by the idea that we should aim for any less for a child from a poor background than a rich one.
— David Cameron
Being an altruist I have an urge in mylife to help poor's but im not Bill Gates
— Bilal Bashir Magry
Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.
— Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone
cross-national studies show that the U.S. poverty rate, which stands persistently above 12 percent, is not only the highest poverty rate of any advanced industrial nation, but is more than twice the average for that group.Pursuing the American Dream, 9, 276
— Calvin C. Jillson
Greed applied is prosperity realized". ~R. Alan Woods [2006]
— R. Alan Woods
I knew, of course, that I should be well paid for my services, but I would gladly have accepted half the sum I expected if I could have had it that night, for our little treasury was wholly exhausted, and we had not sixpence to purchase a breakfast for the following day. When the great hall door shut upon me, and I found myself on the pavement, with all the luxury and splendour on one side, and I and my desolation on the other, the contrast struck me cruelly, for I too, had been rich, and dwelt in illuminated palaces, and had a train of liveried servants at my command, and sweet music had echoed through my halls. I felt desperate, and drawing my hat over my eyes I began pacing the square, forming wild plans for the relief or escape from my misery. ("The Italian's Story")
— Catherine Crowe, The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies
I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.
— Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle
— Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto
The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.
— Rhonda Byrne, The Secret
It might be depressing, but it's also the truth that no one has the power, the money, or the resources to save everyone on the planet from going hungry, living in poverty or allowed basic human rights. But consider the other side of this: there are people in this world who truly WOULD do all of these things for everyone if only they could. There is hope after all.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
Poverty is not only about income levels, but for lack of freedom that comes from physical insecurity
— Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.
— Andrew  Miller, Pure
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
— John Updike
The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.
— Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto
His lines had been honed over centuries, passed down through generations, for poor people needed certain lines; the script was always the same, and they had no option but to beg for mercy.
— Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
I have an old hat which is not worth three francs, I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the daytime, you would give me a sou!
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
At the street corner, a one-storey house built of freestone, but repulsively decrepit and filthy, seemed to command the entrance, like a gaol. And here, indeed, lived La Méchain, like a vigilant proprietess, ever on the watch, exploiting in person her little population of starving tenants.
— Émile Zola, L'Argent
The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds.
— John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
...while God has done his part in creating a world capable of providing what we need, we have not done our part in the stewardship of it, in seeing that it gets to the end of the line, to the poorest and neediest--the children.
— Wess Stafford, Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
The walls around the hood keep the people on the inside from the changes on the outside.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine.
— Stephen King, The Running Man
I'd rather be poor to my bones than be rich with your money, that is like a trigger, ready to be pulled in my face.
— Nema Al-Araby
Poverty is like a crumb that sits at a table, and starves itself to death.
— Anthony Liccione
Poverty fled, she who gives birth to virile men.
— Marcus Annaeus Lucanus
What is Poverty? A hateful good
—  a mother of health
Which statements are true according to the passage?A) Science, governments, and your doctor should be trusted.B) 'Comforting her deep into the night' is a euphemism for sneaking candy.C) The ugliest phrase used in this passage is 'female.'D) Bad things really do come in threes.
— Tupelo Hassman, Girlchild
The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.
— Henry Green
As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
— Ernest Hemingway
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insa
— Franz Kafka
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
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing an
— Junot Díaz
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w
— Susan Sontag
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 writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
— Ernest Hemingway
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
— Oscar Wilde
we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are.
— Tahereh Mafi
I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.
— Sylvia Plath
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
— William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills
I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.
— Sylvia Plath
I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.
— P.G. Wodehouse
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
— Daphne du Maurier
All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts. 
— Lloyd Alexander
As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
— William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays
What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
— Junot Díaz
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
— Aldous Huxley
Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people. All we do is use words to talk about things like the cosmos, the origin of the universe, evolution, the origin of life. What's there to be frightened of? It's just an opinion.
— Richard Dawkins
Writers turn dreams into print.
— James A. Michener, Writer's Handbook: Explorations in Writing and Publishing
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
— P.G. Wodehouse
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
— Rod Serling
All writers are insane!
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
— William Faulkner
Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.
— Blaise Pascal
Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
— P.D. James
Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer -and if so, why?
— Bennett Cerf
Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.
— Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
— Frank Lloyd Wright
Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.
— A. Lee Martinez
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
He'd heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne. This is, of course, absolutely true.
— Terry Pratchett, Snuff
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
— William Faulkner
Make foes of bowmen if you must,Never of penmen.
— Thiruvalluvar, Kural
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
— Italo Calvino
The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.
— Susie Orbach
A man who wields a pen has to be accountable to society.
— Shūsaku Endō, Scandal
Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
— Simone Weil
It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.
— Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music
1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one — fame or delight.5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.6. Cunning and excess are your friends.7. TV and liquor are your enemies.8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.9. You’re done when the crows sing.
— Ron Dakron
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.
— Edward Albee
Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
— Neil Gaiman, Dream Country
The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.
— Hilaire Belloc
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.
— Laurence J. Peter
I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial," said Anne, rather scornfully. "Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted toward each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.
— L.M. Montgomery
We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.
— Boria Sax
A writer fails, not when a reader is not moved; but when, as a reader, the writer is not moved.
— Gerard de Marigny, Signs of War
Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
— William Saroyan
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does
— Groucho Marx
The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.
— Mario Vargas Llosa
Writers are nothing more than borderline schizophrenics who are able to control the voices.
— Jennifer Salaiz
Lewis Carroll. He was an odd one. Real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Completely denied having anything to do with the Alice books. Daft as a brush. You'd have liked him!
— Mike              Tucker, Doctor Who: The Nightmare of Black Island
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
— David Foster Wallace
Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk's Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with "It might come in handy," all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won't even talk to us.
— Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
— Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make
No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.
— W.H. Auden
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
— Lillian Hellman
If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.
— Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Hope is a most beautiful drug.
— Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.
When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specific
— Jaclyn Moriarty, The Spell Book of Listen Taylor
The relationship between a perfect cup of coffee and a writer is just like the couple who always standby and feel proud of being committed to each other.
— Himmilicious
Color me....BRILLIANT.
— Coco J. Ginger
Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.
— Libba Bray
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying it
— Bernard Malamud
Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation. 
— Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame
Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.
— Samuel Johnson
All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.
— Haniel Long, Notes for a New Mythology: Pittsburgh Memoranda
I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.
— Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.
— Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.
— Robert J. Randisi
This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.
— Patrick Rothfuss
...she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Drowning Instinct
Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.
— Anne Lamott, Joe Jones
He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.
— César Aira, Varamo
I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.
— Dean Wesley Smith
So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.
— Stephen King
A kind of losing loadum is their game,Where the worst writer has the greatest fame.
— John Wilmot, The Complete Poems
An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.
— Roy Blount Jr.
For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation
— Graham Greene
An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell
— Tim Lucas, The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula
How become a writer? Naturally.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant.
— Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen And Her Art
I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.
— Sebastian Horsley
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
— Walter Bagehot
NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the Earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink is the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands.
— Xavier Forneret
The fat man looked amused. "What on earth for?" he said. "I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.
— Lavie Tidhar, Osama
The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention – though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.
— Christopher Isherwood
A writer learns that easy to read is hard to write ...
— C.J. Heck
When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.
— Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.
— Gore Vidal
Writers are born, not created.
— Tim Campbell
What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.
— Stephen Jones
It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.
— Parnell Hall
Do you write every day?' 'Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don't work very hard, really. Really I'm on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.' He'd said all this before, to others; he wondered if he'd said it to her. 'It's like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn't ever a time you absolutely had to do it - there was always Saturday, then Sunday - but then there wasn't ever a time when it wasn't there to do, too.''How awful.' ("Novelty")
— John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
It must take a lot of self-discipline,' she said.'Oh, I don't know. I don't have much.' He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that 'Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter - if you write one page a day, you'll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.''I don't know,' she said, laughing. 'I can't even bring myself to write a letter.''Oh, now that's hard.'("Novelty")
— John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
Professional writers write to fit
— Pamela Glass Kelly, From Inspiration to Publication: How to Succeed as a Children's Writer: Advice from 15 Award Winning Writers
Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
— Dean Wesley Smith
I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.
— Ray Bradbury
Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.
— Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence
Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” (p.136)
— Mark David Gerson, The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write
We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.
— Alan Ayckbourn
A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.
— Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film
It's not that [writers] are pompous jerks. We are insecure. We feel like we're fading away in this vast sea of scriveners.
— William Browning Spencer
No matter what level of success, there is no such thing as a secure writer
— Michael Lennick
Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus.
— David Bowker, The Death You Deserve: A Novel
You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party
— William Saroyan
Writers were a strange sort
—  I knew that much from the newspapers.
Many writers were better before they became famous.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
What are they like, writers, in your mind: it may seem strange, but initially it’s not about writing. A writer is someone who struggles with the angels of solitude and truth. A confused struggle, without any clear conclusion.
— Christian Bobin
5.57am and I’m finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn’t get much easier.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz
— Kevin Ansbro
…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death
Writers are the ink of society
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
But I loved those books or at least that first one. And I felt somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must be there. That you couldn't write such beautiful things and have such an ugly heart. But that is the truth. He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.
— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
You are a writer when your overwhelming need to tell a story outweighs your fear of ridicule.
— Julie Rodelli
Fruition-Think of writing as a harvest.You till the ground.Plant.Water.Wait.Apple trees take years to bear fruit.Harvest.Clean.Process.Then you have apple pie.
— Keelie Breanna
I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice--they all make fine fuel.
— Edna Ferber
I am grateful for the white sheet - all my stories are his.
— Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Vesnici oluje
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.
— Fannie Hurst
All writers are exiles: some by circumstance, some by choice.
— Marty Rubin
There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
Names do not write poems nor do they create work.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
Writing allows a person to explore both physical reality and the internal workings of their mind. Writing places us in touch with our unconsciousness. Writing purposefully, applying the white heat of self-examination, can act to transform oneself. Writing allows a person with sufficient resolve to anneal their basic constitution, make their mind more flexible.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The communication function of modern writers is akin to the ancient role fulfilled by tribal shamans. All writers ultimately perform a shamanistic role in society
—  their mythmaking voices speak to us from the underworld after their passage to the other side. Writers place themselves in a trance-like state where their unconscious mind dictates to them what to write.
In the writer's mind, even a backstory has a backstory.
— Terry a O'Neal
One great pleasure of being a writer is possessing the power to determine the fate of my characters and how the story will end.
— Terry a O'Neal
Just because I'm a writer doesn't mean that my personal experiences are embellished. Every life has a story.
— Terry a O'Neal
A writer is not born but made through study and sheer willpower and ability to embrace beauty and agony.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing requires a prolong period of academic education supplemented by studiously scrutinizing society and its customs. Writers also analyze their own nature and physical surroundings, a self-directed exploration of their internal and external environment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writer’s amulets include explication, free association, parallelism, antithesis, and epiphany to create a silhouette of that which heretofore did not exist and now speaks with an autonomous, ghostly reverberation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is a solitary venture. Making use of a soundless void in the vortex of time the author enters the realm of restoration, an undertaking where he or she explores that private psychic space of the self. In this mystical state of heightened awareness, the writer investigates the soul’s grievances, and diagnoses and treats their grim afflictions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each of us, along with our ancestors, inhabits the same cosmos. When we tell stories, we enter the stream of human consciousness; we take with us into the Ring of Time the people whom we crossed paths with in our earthly sojourn.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls