Top Writers On Writing Quotes

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

As a writer, you don't just write for the ears, you also write for the eyes.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

A writer's work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own lif...

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone el...

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to...

A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!

Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

It's an important thing and a necessary thing as a writer to always be reaching outside of yourself. They say write what you know. But what you know is rarely enough. You need to know more. But you've...

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrali...

If he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process...

Mi vida estuvo siempre perturbada por una maraña de trampas, gambetas e ilusiones para burlar los incontables señuelos que trataban de convertirme en cualquier cosa que no fuera escritor.

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of th...

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able...