W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Writers are used to being re-created, and need it.”
“Writers are voracious readers. Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me. Everything was fair game, from Louisa May Alcott to my older cousin's True Romance Magazines, from Lewis Carroll to the backs of cereal boxes. All of this fed me, but it took certain books to make me grow. I don't want to work without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.”
“Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.”
Source: The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling
“Writers are wizards- they create magic, but their wands are pens, and they create stories not spells.”
“Writers aren't born properly labeled so it is hard to know one when one appears.”
“Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.”
“Writers aren't like plumbers. If you're a plumber, you fix one person's boiler in the morning, then you go and fix another in the afternoon. I didn't want to write a book unless I had something new to say - and it was good to live a little in between.”
“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“Writers around the world protested when two Communist writers, Siniavski and Daniel, were sentenced to prison by their own comrades. But not even churches protest when Christians are put in prison for their faith.”
“Writers block to me is all the voices in your head trying to tune out the one voice that has something worthy say.”
“Writers block: when I get it, it's because my subconscious spotted that I'd make a huge structural mistake in constructing a novel before my conscious mind became aware of it, and threw on the brakes. So I've learned not to sweat it: take two days off, then back up a chapter, read through, and try to work out why I'm suddenly uneasy about continuing.”
“Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.”
Source: This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Collected African Stories Volume One
“Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.”
“Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day.”
Source: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut
“Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.”
“Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.”
Source: The Writer Who Stayed
“Writers can write whatever they want, but after THE END, when they self publish their book, they become accountable to readers for the quality of the book they're selling.”
Source: Being Indie: A No Holds Barred, Self Publishing Guide for Indie Authors
“Writers can't write as fast as governments make wars; because to write demands thinking.”
“Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm.”
“Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.”
“Writers change the world one heart, one mind, at a time. That should be enough to keep us going.”
“Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.”
“Writers craft worlds from words, building realms that exist between imagination and reality. Their stories carry emotions, histories, and ideas that readers live within. Through writing, a single mind can touch countless hearts across time and space.”
“Writers create impressions that inspire, stir emotions, evoke questions and sprinkle seeds of awe.”
“Writers do like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat. It’s only that money isn’t the driving force. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. Think of it. Employers pay salaries for time. That is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step—their time—and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it. They hold on to it and aren’t so eager to sell it.”
Source: Writing Down the Bones, Freeing the Writer Within
“writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.”
Source: Parachutes & kisses
“writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.”
“Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.”
“Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.”
“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
“Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.”
Source: In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers
“Writers do not write about a place because they belong there, but because they want to.”
“Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don’t understand either.”
“Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.”
“Writers do the self-censoring before they even get to the studio executive, because they know the film will not run that gauntlet. They, because they want to get their films made, they censor it.”
“Writers don't get mad they get even in their novels.”
“Writers don't just create pages in a novel, but depth to worlds that become a safe haven for those who wish to escape the reality of their own.”
“Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
“Writers don't always know what they mean - that's why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one.”
“Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!”
“Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.”
“writers don't like to write letters. Too much like work.”
Source: Letters of Mari Sandoz
“Writers don't need love; all they require is money.”
“Writers don't need to be given formulas; they need to be shown possibilities.”
“Writers don't often say anything that readers don't already know, unless its a news story. A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do.”
Source: Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit
“Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody. "Your very own words," indeed ! And who are you?”
Source: Brion Gysin let the mice in
“Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.”
“Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.”
Source: Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962
“Writers don't want to appear to be stupid. I don't know - maybe people become writers so that they can prove that they're not. Of course getting a book published doesn't mean that they're not stupid. At a certain point you have to stop trying to prove something and write because you need to think about something and want to communicate, in a very broad sense.”