W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Writers don't write to inform other people, they write to find out something themselves.”
“Writers don’t care what they eat. They just care what you think of them”
Source: Harriet the Spy: 50th Anniversary Edition
“Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and size, and we struggle to let them glide, rather than thrash at sea.”
“Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”
Source: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
“Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough”
“Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.”
Source: Conversations with William Styron
“Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.”
“Writers feel that they can't afford to wait. They must do it now, and they are so clever, and there is so much competition. I'm quite happy to wait, and quite confident that the muses will cross the stream.”
“Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives – to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death – and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies.”
Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
“Writers from the majority can assume their audiences know what they're talking about - they don't have to explain things, whereas minority writers are expected to.”
“Writers generally get into writing because they want to write, not because they want to be independent publishers, and you can't really fault someone for saying, 'What I'm doing right now works, so there's no reason to change it.'”
“Writers get exactly the right amount of fame: just enough to get a good table in a restaurant but not enough so that people are constantly interrupting you while you're eating dinner.”
“Writers get to know me very well. It always serves me in the end because I feel I have a deeper understanding of the character and sometimes they really like my ideas and they use them.”
“Writers get to stay with the piece. They don't just turn the script in and somebody else takes it over and goes out and produces it and edits it and all that stuff. We stay with the piece all the way through.”
“Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self.
(In reference to Audre Lorde)”
“Writers give titles.
Don't label a work of art you didn't create.”
“Writers have a job to do. Editors do, too. You have to stand ground and cede ground on a case by case basis. When an editor tells me something isn't working and I still believe in it, I tend to think it just isn't working hard enough.”
“Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.”
“Writers have always liked my stuff, pretty much. That's what I wanted - I think my goal wasn't to get rich and famous, necessarily, though I cared about that. I always thought, "Oh, this could be a hit," or "that will sell records." But the first thing I wanted was that people who knew a lot about music, or had taste-making qualities, they would like my stuff. Writers, people like that.”
“Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.”
“Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.”
“Writers have influenced thoughts, principals, viewpoints and experiences throughout history. A talented writer’s pen is anointed with magic!”
“Writers have limits, I don't, I am not a writer. I am a dimension immeasurable - siphon all you want, I won't run dry.”
Source: The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo
“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”
“Writers have opinions - that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.”
“Writers have problems writing sex scenes, because writing one really well is pornography.”
“Writers have superpowers.”
“Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.”
“Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.”
“Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.”
“Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.”
“Writers have told me more than once that I'm a better interview in defeat than in victory, which is a compliment I am extremely proud of.”
Source: Jack Nicklaus
“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”
Source: War Talk
“Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.”
Source: Silences
“Writers in Latin America live in a reality that is extraordinarily demanding. Surprisingly, our answer to these demands protects and develops our individuality. I feel I am not alone in trying to give their voice to those who don't have it.”
“Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.”
Source: Conversations with Don DeLillo
“Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.”
“writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks.”
Source: Foul Matter
“Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.”
“Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches.”
“Writers know that if you want to portray a person succinctly, tellingly, you describe the way he eats. Food is the royal road to the unconscious.”
Source: Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times
“Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.”
“Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers. From reading.”
“Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.”
“Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated.”
Source: Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith
“Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.”
“Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.”
“Writers like Twain, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, Alice Walker, so many others that I read coming up as a writer, that helped form my ideas of what it means to be American - and an American writer. I'm always in conversation with them.”
“Writers love to write those idiotic, long stage directions, and some of them worse than others. They have nothing to do with the movie. They're just jerking around.”
“Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.”