Writers Quotes - Page 8

all that really matters to me is that there are critics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Writers are compulsive liars desperately trying to tell themselves the truth.

Anthony Marais

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

The sea of reporters on her lawn made Loretta Brooks do a double take.

Missy Lyons

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

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

Charles Bukowski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t ever trust anyone who’s writing a book. They make up lies for a living.

Rosemary Clement-Moore

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

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

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.

Ian McEwan

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

Writers strive for the impossible: perfection. Even the universe is flawed.

Chloe Thurlow

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

An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who’s the better writer?

Jason Lutes

It feels like someone is gripping my heart and twisting it. It feels like I can't breathe. I shut my eyes tightly against the memory that is threatening to surface. I can't br

Ashley Earley

I didn’t need to be a writer to know that I could. Did you have to become a penis to act like a dick?

Crystal Woods

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.

Robert M. Pirsig

No one can sing well, play well, or write well, without living through moments of the deepest pain and anguish. Every real talent has known times of torturing depression when the heart in its agony has cried out to God: “Why hast Thou forsaken me? What have I done that I should suffer so?" And then, at the very darkest moment, suddenly, the veil is torn from their eyes! Truth, with her flaming torch, stands before them, and they understand that God sends them suffering to strengthen and ennoble their talent, that it may touch men's hearts and show to tired wanderers on earth glimpses of heaven.

Aimée Dostoyevsky

Not all writers are silently suffering inside. But it certainly helps.

Joyce Rachelle

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Writers Quotes - Page 8

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