Quotes on Writers :: Finest Quotes

Writers Quotes

Unlike a number of sensational writers, I do not want wish to convey the impression that there are witches at work on every corner of the land.

Gerald Gardner

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

Gwendolyn Brooks

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

Samuel Johnson

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

There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths, and the lesser ones, who can only give you themselves.

Clifton Fadiman

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Joseph Stalin

I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Joan Didion

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

Irvin S. Cobb

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.

Wolcott Gibbs

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard-by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.

Archibald MacLeish

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

John Updike

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

W. H. Auden

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

Tina Fey

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

Stephen Ambrose

In America, only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.

Geoffrey Cottrell

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

William E. Gladstone

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The wonderful fortune of some writers deludes and leads to misery a great number of young people.

Jean-Antoine Petit-Senn

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Isaac Asimov

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Aubrey Beardsley

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

John Le Carre

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

Mark Haddon

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