W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Writers should be heard, not seen.”
“Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.”
Source: A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography
“Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”
“Writers should cut as close to the vein as possible. The readers don't want to be covered in your warm sticky blood, but they want to come as close to it as possible.”
“Writers should provoke disagreement.”
“Writers should take advantage of their surroundings, if only to trigger memories that juice their writing.”
“Writers shouldn't fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence -- it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it -- don't talk about it. And if you hate my books -- please, for God's sake, shout it from the hills!”
“Writers shouldn't fall in love with their characters so much that they lose sight of what they're trying to accomplish. The idea is to write a whole story, a whole book. A writer has to be able to look at that story and see whether or not a character works, whether or not a character needs further definition.”
“Writers shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of what they’re doing, and they should treat it with great seriousness. You’re doing something that really matters, you’re telling stories that have an impact on other people and on the culture. You should tell the best stories you can possibly tell and put everything you’ve got into it.”
“Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.”
“Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.”
“Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.”
Source: The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell
“Writers speak for those who are kept in silence”
“Writers speak stench.”
“Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day”
“Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.”
“Writers strive to create definitive statements but forget that their work is often viewed through the cracked spectacles of perception. Others can take what is written, twist it to their own agenda and present it back to the author as fact, contrary to the original intention.”
“Writers survive within pages. This is a gift from a writer to a reader. Regeneration by pure esoteric thought." - Susan Marie”
“Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”
“Writers talk about the agony of writing; I talk about the agony of not writing.”
“Writers talk too much.”
Source: Conversations with Lillian Hellman
“Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most.”
“Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.”
“Writers…tell the truth as it is on a given day, given page, given novel.”
Source: To Any Lengths (Book 2) Venus as She Ages Collection
“Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.”
Source: What Do Women Want?: Essays by Erica Jong
“Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers.”
Source: The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World
“Writers tend to hate recurring characters; there's this writer snob thing about it. But I don't have that. I feel like the challenge is always to find a cool and innovative way to do it and, obviously, to not repeat your jokes.”
“Writers tend to suffer from back problems because they spend their time bent over a desk.”
“Writers tend to think they occupy a much more relevant place in society than we actually do. But we really are closer to buffoons and jesters than we are to whistle-blowers or moral guides. Accepting our rather insignificant place in society can be depressing - but it's also freeing.”
“Writers tend to work early in the morning, or late at night, when brains are naturally able to focus deeply on one thought. In the middle of the day, distractions are unavoidable. I wonder if anything worthwhile has ever been written in the afternoon.”
“Writers that pretend to be in the throes of some kind of genius-demon, some kind of possessing spirit that refuses to let them engage with Normal Life are bullshit artists of the highest degree, looking to excuse their antisocial tendencies and bad manners away with a flourish of vocabulary and the semantic waving of hands.”
“Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.”
Source: The History of Freedom (and other Essays)
“Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.”
Source: The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing
“Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.”
Source: Living in Hope and History
“Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.”
“Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors. All are continually asking, "What does this represent? What does it stand for?" They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.”
“Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.”
“Writers today must navigate the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era. When does jargon end and a new vernacular begin? Where's the line between neologism and hype? What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in buzzwords? Is it possible to write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry?”
“Writers turn dreams into print.”
“Writers understand the world better, but they lack the strength to change it. Perhaps that is so because they understand their limitations more than others.”
Source: The Girl on the Trail
“Writers use both their blood and their brains to explore the darkest recesses of their pooling self. Writing allows us to harness the whimsy of the collaborative mind and body, pull our tissue apart like taffy, and expose the composition of our life sustaining organs. Telling our personal story forces us to account for any actions that made us laugh, cry, scream and shout, or hide behind a cloak of mootness. Critical examination of the self allows one to disintegrate the envelope of their present personality and make up a new imaging.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Writers used to make such wonderful pictures without all that swearing, all that cursing. And now it seems that you can't say three words without cursing. And I don't think that's right.”
“Writers vary tremendously. Was it Tom Wolfe who stood up or was it [Ernest] Hemingway who had to stand up? I don't know.”
“Writers want recognition, audience, some corroboration that all those hours at the desk and in daydreams add up to something in the esteem of others.”
“Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.”
“Writers were a strange sort; I knew that much from the newspapers.”
Source: Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth
“Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.”
“Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.”
Source: Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals
“Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.”
“Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.”