After studying and writing the article on Quotation Marks, and working on a resume for one of my favorite writing tools (Grammarly’s Handbook), a desire was born inside me all of a sudden to find out what other writers are saying about… writers.
Therefore, I compiled several special quotes from what 27 writers, have said about writers.
First, let me add to this list, what Grammarly has stated.
Our favorite writers may seem like heroes to us, but they went through many of the same struggles we face today. The most inspirational quotes by writers are often for writers, and they each address a specific problem. ~ Grammarly® Blog
“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.”
“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.”
“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
“The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with… stream of consciousness, as it’s called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.”
“I found out about reviews early on. They’re mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That’s probably why I’m less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.”
“There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.”
“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.”
“Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?”
“Today, writers want to impress other writers.”
“I don’t have a room full of writers pitching ideas. It’s just me out of my head.”
“The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it’s also full of fourth-rate readers.”
“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”
“My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly – all these make for great stories.”
“From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.”
“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.”
“I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.”
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”
“If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”
“Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.”
“Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it’s nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.”
“Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We’re dreamers, you see, but we’re also realists, of a sort.”
“A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that’s great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.”
“I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.”
“The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.”
“Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don’t think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.”
“Many writers can’t make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don’t really know about its value to the student. I don’t mean it’s useless. But I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.”
“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”
