Writer Quotations

You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.

The smartest thing I ever did as a writer was hire a retired conservation agent to blaze a hiking trail for me. It's nothing fancy - just a narrow path that meanders for a little over a mile through the woods near my home. But that trail through the trees has become my therapist, my personal trainer, and my best editor.

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

The Nationals tried hard to recover the lost ground. The final result, however, was the success of the Forest Citys by a score of 29 to 23 in a nine innings game, twice interrupted by rain.

I'm looking forward to coming to SleuthFest I've heard so many good things about it from my writer friends. I'm looking forward to seeing my buddies and talking to readers who want to know about the way I work.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.

As adults feign disinterest in science - children can grab hold of it to distinguish themselves.

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.

All of our affairs, since the union of crowns, have been managed by the advice of English ministers, and the principal offices of the kingdom filled with such men, as the court of England knew would be subservient to their designs.

Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.

Never attribute to malice, that which can be reasonably explained by stupidity.

Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing.

He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.

Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is that scribbling child in a grown-up body wondering if anybody is listening.

One of the things when you're drawing a comic book is that you're spending four or five times as long to draw it as the writer takes to write it. In my career I've had to spend a week drawing something that a writer has thrown out in an hour. And there's nothing worse than having to work on something that no previous thought has gone into.

An ordinary kitten will ask more questions than any five-year-old.

We need a reason to speak but none to keep silent.

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

I am the first one to go to university in my family. I am the first writer as well. My dad is a retired policeman, and my mom works for a glass-processing company. She is health-and-safety manager, and my stepfather is a plumber. I have four half siblings, one from my mom's marriage and three from my dad's marriage, so we are kind of scattered.

We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me.

I would be ecstatic if the very first writer to step foot in a Storyknife cabin was an Alaska Native woman writer.

The most difficult thing about living as a writer is precisely 'having to write.' Pretending to be a writer is easy. Living freely, reading many books, going on frequent trips, cultivating minor eccentricities... but genuinely being a writer is difficult, because you have to write something that will convince both yourself and readers.

When you sit down to write, you have to be prepared to strip all of those voices away, all of the censors away, and talk about what you think the truth is, which I think is really the task of the writer - to get to the truth.

It's as if our electric grid didn't even have fences around it. This is disgraceful what we do, and what we don't do, to protect the Internet.

Base Ball, to be played thoroughly, requires the possession of muscular strength, great agility, quickness of eye, readiness of hand, and many other faculties of mind and body that mark the man of nerve.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.

Between 1950 and 1951, I worked as a temporary employee in the Cologne Bureau of Statistics. From summer 1951 on, I have lived as a freelance writer with a fixed postal address in Cologne but with a continually shifting place of work.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

She would have been a very remarkable woman, if she had not been an old maid.

A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.

The greatest danger of bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke.

The whole world loves a maverick and the whole world wants the maverick to achieve something nobler than simple rebellion.

Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development.

Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

One of the reasons we survive as a band is that we are seen as a band of today. We don't want to be seen as a band that tours and plays old songs. We feel that we are making the best music of our careers.

By building relations we create a source of love and personal pride and belonging that makes living in a chaotic world easier.

I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

My dad's a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player - he's a bluegrass musician. It's always been a part of the family.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'

May you live to see the green grass growing over your grave.

Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.

I came from two harsh dictatorships, Nazi and Stalinist. I never thought of becoming a writer as such, yet in a lucid moment, I recognised what I had to do.

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

There is, indeed, no single quality of the cat that man could not emulate to his advantage.

Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time.

When we hide our failings from others, we seek to hide them from ourselves, and it is in the latter attempt that we are most successful.

Tomorrow is not promised to any of us.

During the holiday season, it's easy to forget that sometimes the best gift of all is simply the gift of time. I can't think of anything a writer would appreciate more than being given time and space to work.

You sound like a man with a vision. Care to pass that bong over this way?

Saw a wedding in the church. It was strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.

This is a revolution, damnit! We're going to have to offend somebody!

My mission as a writer is to give my readers hope to carry with them, and to promote a belief that they can do anything they set their minds to.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

People and places are the source of my work, both in prose and verse-and this remark is not the truism it seems, for I do not distinguish as sharply between a place and a person as most people seem to do.

It is the responsibility of leadership to provide opportunity, and the responsibility of individuals to contribute.

It doesn't really mean a great deal of difference to a life. You live as you wish to do and if a job is oppressing, you leave it. I've done it on several occasions.

I could have had class. I could have been a contender.

We later moved to Rome, where I am presently living.

The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

One of the advantages of having gone to Penn State was having had a scholar for a mentor - Philip Young. Also, a professional writer named Philip Klass taught there. He was a science fiction writer whose pseudonym was William Tenn. As a professional writer, he brought wisdom to teaching because he'd done it for a living.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

Today it's almost impossible to do it unless you are an actress or writer with power... I wouldn't hesitate right this minute to hire a talented woman if the subject matter were right.

I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.

'Between Shades of Gray' is a story of astonishing force. I feel grateful for a writer like Ruta Sepetys who bravely tells the hard story of what happens to the innocent when world leaders and their minions choose hate and oppression. Beautiful and unforgettable.

The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

There's something exciting about weekly strips in that you're following the way the story reveals itself to the writer week by week. All the possible directions it could have taken are there; it's a kind of participatory reading that I think books discourage.

How it happened that Mastro Cherry, carpenter, found a piece of wood that wept and laughed like a child.

I'm not intelligent. I'm not arrogant. I'm just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn't want to become a writer - it just happened.

Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

My hope is for a literature that raises the language above the ordinary, makes words both functional and emotional, and to resonate at the frequency of the human spirit - the skill and insight of the writer lifting the parochial novel above the level of regional concern. Making it personal, national, and universal.

There's a book called 'Where The Wild Things Are,' by American writer Maurice Sendak... it really is the most sublime book. It's a picture book, but it works at so many levels, and it's fantastic.

Nobody's a natural. You work to get good and then work to get better. It's hard to stay on top.

It was not long before I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for a national sport for Americans.

To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it life will be valueless.

Mystery writing involves solving a puzzle, but 'high suspense' writing is a situation whereby the writer thrusts the hero/heroine into high drama.

Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don't know who that's attributed to. I think it's Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony.

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a net.

I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves.

Real people are places to me as much as persons: I want to see them, as I want to see the places I am fond of, in all weathers and at all times of the year.

The flower is a jumble of thighs, the sun's harem - the most oriental thing imaginable.

Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.

A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we control what we want to write about.

I was allowed to wander where I could. Here is a case in which you search for your independence and allow something creative to come out of that.