Quotes of: Great-writer Keyword

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a write...

Wole Soyinka

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

How to Grow a Novel: The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Overcome Them

To be a writer, you must write. To be a published writer you must finish what you write and then get what you've written in front of the outside world.

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1980

All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards...

Janet Frame: An Autobiography

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love

Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.

Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background 1100-1500

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper ...

One Man's Meat

When a writer has deep thoughts, I expect him to also have a deep voice. And if he doesn’t, he should remain silent and let his writer’s voice do all the speaking for him.

This Book is Not FOR SALE

One ought to have some sort of transcendent realization that the world exists because the gods are trapped in the same abyss you've occupied for three years. It should be inspiring or comforting or, I don't know, cathartic.

Writers of the Future Volume 30

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers

I feel when a writer treats a character as 'precious,' the writer runs the risk of turning them into a comic book character. There's nothing wrong with comic book characters in comic books, but I don't write comic books.

Raymond E. Feist

The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it refle...

Teju Cole

Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.

Terry Pratchett

'Catholic writer' seems like you have an agenda of evangelization, as if you were somehow influenced in your choice of perspective by dogma or canon law. That has nothing to do with me. I don't have a lot in common with other 'Catholic' writers.

Mary Gordon

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

Martin McDonagh

A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.

S. Ansky

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.

Sandra Cisneros

The original idea of blog publishing was that writer and reader would be on the same level. That it would be a conversation - not a lecture. People lost sight of that. We didn't. Kinja is designed to break down the walls of the ghettos. So that every...

Nick Denton

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

Neil Gaiman