W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.”
Source: Essays and aphorisms
“Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.”
Source: The Art of Literature: Top of Schopenhauer
“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”
“Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.”
“Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.”
“Writers must be fair and remember even bad guys (most of them, anyway) see themselves as good—they are the heroes of their own lives. Giving them a fair chance as characters can create some interesting shades of gray—and shades of gray are also a part of life.”
“Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.”
“Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.”
“Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.”
“Writers need each other.”
“Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."”
“Writers need their wandering just as fish need their swimming and birds need their flying!”
“Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.”
Source: The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
“Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.”
“Writers never get a very good deal in Hollywood.”
“Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.”
“Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.”
“Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.”
“Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.”
Source: Conversations with Julian Barnes
“Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.”
Source: Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II
“Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form”
“Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.”
“writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.”
Source: A Kind of Magic
“Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.”
Source: The Mirabelle Bevan Mystery Collection: Brighton Belle, London Calling and England Expects
“Writers often have a 'drunk' that is different than anyone else's. That's why it's so insidious and so damning. First of all, because they can write when they're drinking - or they think they can. A lot of writers will tell me - and this is the latest one I've heard - you drink while you're thinking about what to write, but when you actually write, you sober up.”
“Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” (p.136)”
Source: The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write
“Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.”
“Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst”
Source: Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography
“Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal.”
“Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.”
Source: How Writing Is Written
“Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.”
“Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?”
“Writers, poets and artists inspire each other. I believe they become muses for each other.”
“Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.”
“Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.”
“Writers really do that. We weep over our characters. We are saddened sometimes for days when we say goodbye to a world or a character. They do become our best friends. I've probably spent more time with them over the past 22, 24 years than I have spent with most of the real members of my family.”
“Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.”
“Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.”
“Writers resist the terrifying silence that engulfs us.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread”
“Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion.”
“Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is useful.”
“Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane”
“Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.”
“Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.”
“Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.”
Source: Contemplations: Being Several Short Essays Helpful Sermonettes, Epigrams and Orphic Sayings
“Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.”
Source: The Best American Essays
“Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.”
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
“Writers should be able to fully deduct from their taxes all writing-related expenses, including alcohol, parking tickets, court judgments, fines for lewd public behavior, Zoloft, and cigarettes.”
“Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.”