Writer quotes

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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.

- John Irving

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

- Isadora Duncan

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.

- Augusten Burroughs

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

- James Houston

TV is very much a producer and writer or creator-driven machine in the States. And I'm the kind of actor that needs to be pushed and have someone on my case a little bit, so I suffer from that.

- Rose Byrne

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

- Dorothy L. Sayers

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

- Ernest Hemingway

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

- Frederik Pohl

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

- Anais Nin

No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.

- Zane Grey

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

- W. H. Auden

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

- John Cheever

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

- Edna Ferber

I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.

- John Sayles

I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.

- Terry Brooks

I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.

- Sidney Sheldon

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

- James McBride

My family is involved and my wife Brenda is a great, great writer. She helps me with the writing of everything and also sings with me. I owe a lot to Brenda.

- Rick Derringer

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

- J. G. Ballard

The show was number one in the ratings, Gordon Russell was our head writer, the story lines were magnificent and the acting most exciting. I loved working with Judith Light and all the other actors on the show at that time.

- Michael Storm

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

- Mel Brooks

My relatives used to laugh when I talked of being a writer.

- Taylor Caldwell

I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe.

- Steven Curtis Chapman

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

- Flannery O'Connor

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

- Rick Moody

I am a sensitive writer, actor and director. Talking business disgusts me. If you want to talk business, call my disgusting personal manager.

- Sylvester Stallone

I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.

- Peter Benchley

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

- Willa Cather

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.

- Lafcadio Hearn

Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that.

- Fran Drescher