The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well. — Elias Canetti
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. — John Updike
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint. — J. M. Coetzee
I think that successful writers somehow capture truths that resonate with readers. — Steven Gundry
The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity. — Dmitri Shostakovich
Show me a writer, any writer, who hasn't suffered and I'll show you someone who writes in pastels as opposed to primary colors. — Rita Mae Brown
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth. — William Butler Yeats
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. — William Faulkner
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes. — Cole Porter
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element. — Derek Walcott
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
Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty. — Herbert Gold
Short Great Writers Quotes
A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite — William Goldman
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. — Stephen Spender
Every writer I know has trouble writing. — Joseph Heller
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living. — Harold Pinter
Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters. — A. Lee Martinez
Top 10 Great Writers Quotes
I can’t write five words but that I change seven. — Dorothy Parker
I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol. — Steven Seagal
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. — Barbara Kingsolver
Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special. — Carl Hiaasen
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters. — James A. Michener
Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. — Franz Kafka
Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah. — David Mamet
Live an interesting life. Meet people. Read a lot and widely, learn from the great writers — Michael Morpurgo
I think the toughest thing for me to figure out, as an actor, was how to translate all those layers that are in there and that history that the writers have done such a great job at forming. — Alycia Debnam Carey
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway
Great Writers Image Quotes
Silence is a source of great strength.
Writers And Poets Quotes
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects. — Lafcadio Hearn
Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life. — Joseph B. Wirthlin
Those who perceive in themselves... the artistic vocation as poet, writer, sculptor, painter, musician, and actor feel at the same time an obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it to service of their neighbour and the humanity as a whole. — Pope John Paul II
Make today so awesome, yesterday gets jealous.
Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet. — Anne Stevenson
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling
Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. — Trent Zelazny
Great minds discuss ideas.Average minds discuss events.Small minds discuss people.
A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience. — Joan Aiken
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. — Samuel McChord Crothers
The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn. — Nikki Giovanni
Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate. — Raymond Carver
Great Literature Quotes
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. — B. F. Skinner
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth. — Edward Dahlberg
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression. — Karl Philipp Moritz
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. — A. E. Housman
Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes. — John Podhoretz
First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish. — Barbara Walters
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature. — Ravi Shankar
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. — Vladimir Nabokov
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe
Acknowledge all of your small victories. They will eventually add up to something great.
If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow. — Louis L'Amour
The number one thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence. Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every person out there isn't dating a writer. — Rachel Bloom
writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers. — Charles Bukowski
You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.
Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over. — Hunter S. Thompson
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. — Harlan Ellison
As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience. — Sylvia Day
The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book. — Mickey Spillane
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. ... It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus. — Enid Bagnold
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. — Alfred North Whitehead
Failure is a great teacher, and, if you are open to it, every mistake has a lesson to offer.
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties. — Graham Greene
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. — Barbara Kingsolver
I look for strong people. I don't like people who'll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that's reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to The Standard. — Anna Wintour
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy-the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops — William Saroyan
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed. — Gertrude Stein
You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers? — Gore Vidal
I'm sort of an 'automatic' writer. I'm not much for chiseling away at songs or working at them for days trying to make them perfect. If I can sit down and write something in five minutes, then that's great. And if that doesn't happen, then either it doesn't get finished or else it's usually not any good. — Leon Russell
But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living. — Fay Godwin
Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together: And it is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them. It produces excellent writers, and encourages men of fine genius. — Benjamin Franklin
Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself. — Vincent Price
Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. — Mark Twain
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are. — Gore Vidal
When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer have perished. — Theodore Roosevelt
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention. — Ernest Hemingway
Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer. — Chuck Jones
They say that to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived — Cynthia Rylant
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind. — Edmund Burke
Listen to the Bee Gees and you can learn to be a great writer. — Kara DioGuardi
Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy. — Irwin Shaw
There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself. — Sally Mann
I still run into people in the business who skip over any other credits I have and say, 'I loved 'Hey, Dude!'' This was back in '88, '89, '90. It was a goofy show about kids working at a dude ranch in Arizona. We did 65 episodes; I wrote 13 of them. We didn't know what we were doing, but it was writers' boot camp. It was great. — Graham Yost
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible. — Craig Raine
A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to. — Tom Bissell
Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener. — Nanci Griffith
I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day. — Angela Carter
Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English. — Camilla Lackberg
My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with. — Jo Nesbo
I was a pretty good fighter. But it was the writers who made me great. — Jack Dempsey
In Conclusion
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