Writers Quotes - Some interesting and inspiring quotes for writers I enjoy reading are here. Hope you too will enjoy these. Also check Inspirational writing quotes (images).
"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any."
- Orson Scott Card
"Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks."
- Richard Curtis
"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
-Willa Cather
"It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly." -
- C. J. Cherryh
"In nearly all good fiction, the basic - all but inescapable - plot form is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw."
- John Gardner
"I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties."
- Agatha Christie
"A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing."
- Eugene Ionesco
"Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
- Colette
"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does."
- William Faulkner
"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
- Oliver Herford
"This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address."
- Barbara Kingsolver
"There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing -- to find honest men to publish it -- and to get sensible men to read it."
- Charles Caleb Cotton
"Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The historian records, but the novelist creates."
- E. M. Forster
"A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing."
- Eugene Ionesco
" If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."
- Somerset Maugham
"The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea."
-Thomas Mann
"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money."
- Jules Renard
"You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed."
- Larry Niven
"One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating."
- Niyi Osundare
"Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better."
- V. S. Pritchett
"If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry."
- James J. Kilpatrick
"Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead." - Gene Fowler
"If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper."
- T.S. Eliot
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
-Thomas Jefferson
"The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it."
- Leo Rosten
"Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."
- E.L. Doctorow
"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
- Robert A. Heinlein
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme."
- Herman Melville
"A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments."
- Joyce Cary
"I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading."
- V. S. Naipaul
"My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it."
- Ernest Hemingway
"Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind." - Rudyard Kipling
"You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer..." - Stephen Leigh
"Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."
- William Faulkner
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