Being A Great Writer Quotes & Sayings

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably. — Jodi Picoult

I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined. — Irvin D. Yalom

I think distance also helps me gain an certain critical perspective that's essential for good writing. It makes it possible to be more truthful in my writing, to speak some harsh truths. And being an immigrant in America, always having this outsider-rinsider thing going on, is such great training for being a writer. Because that's what writers are - outsiders wanting to get on the inside and insiders longing to burst out. — Thrity Umrigar

When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation. — Jude Law

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist. — Lytton Strachey

My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments. — Abraham Verghese

I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person. — Rebecca Miller

Being a great writer is not the same as writing great. — John Updike

Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own. — Megan Amram

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all ... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else. — Katherine Mansfield

My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist. — Nick Flynn

The conservative media game was neatly summarized by Matt Labash, a former senior writer for The Weekly Standard, in a 2003 interview on the website journalismjobs. Labash explained: 'The conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket.' — Matt Labash

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society ... Writing is today's currency for good ideas. — Jason Fried

I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun. — George Saunders

Being a writer is great, and being a parent is great, and I hate Marching Band. — MaryJanice Davidson

Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions. — Anton Chekhov

I love being a writer. I have a great life. I get up in the morning and pad around in my dressing gown and listen to Radio 4. — John Niven

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them. — Eudora Welty

I love a lots of things about being a writer! The thrill of seeing characters come to life, and the satisfaction as a story starts to fall into place. Independence not being answerable to anyone but myself or tied to a nine-to-five routine is very important to me, too. And of course, it's great being a writer when it comes to parties! In my experience, most people are fascinated by the process of writing and the whole idea of romantic fiction, even if they have never read any. — Jessica Hart

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. — Natalie Goldberg

I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become. — Amelie Nothomb

My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own. — Pat Conroy

No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I'll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I'm usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I'm a writer. Then there's always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, 'Have you written anything I might have heard of? — Anne Lamott

Being a good observer is a great tool to have as a writer, just taking the world in. — Lauren Conrad

When you make something, if you are a painter or a writer, a degree, or a sculptor or whatever or a musician, a degree of energy is required to make it, and I'm not sure that it is always aggressive, but when you have a great deal of energy it can appear to be more aggressive than it is. In fact, I mean you can talk about a waterfall being aggressive, but in fact it is just a very powerful forward movement of energy, and although I think sometimes my engine house is a kind of anger. — Simon McBurney

Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah. — David Mamet

It's great being a part time writer. If you sell books you're a success. But if you don't sell any then all you have to say is " writing is just an amusing hobby". — Aaron T. Knight

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer - any writer, beginning or otherwise - is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or - kindest of all - goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind. — Shirley Jackson

I tell my students, if you're interested in marine biology or llama farming, follow that string. Yes, it will probably take you a longer time to write that book, but it's not a race. That's another great thing about being a writer: you don't age out. — Debra Dean

As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing. — Dinaw Mengestu

Being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody. Whereas, as an actor, you have to audition or wait for somebody else to make a decision about how to use you, with writing, you can do it anywhere, anytime you want. You don't have to ask permission. — Sam Shepard

The effectiveness of an author turns chiefly upon his getting the reputation that he should be read. But by practicing various arts, by the operation of chance, and by certain natural affinities, this reputation is quickly won by a hundred worthless people: while a worthy writer may come by it very slowly and tardily. The former possess friends to help them; for the rabble is always a numerous body which holds well together. The latter has nothing but enemies; because intellectual superiority is everywhere and under all circumstances the most hateful thing in the world, and especially to bunglers in the same line of work, who want to pass for something themselves. This being so, it is a prime condition for doing any great work
any work which is to outlive its own age, that a man pay no heed to his contemporaries, their views and opinons, and the praise or blame which they bestow. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody. — Sam Shepard

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read. — Nick Hornby

It's great to be excited by your profession, whether you are a doctor or a writer. I started writing books when I was in medical school and, by the time I graduated, I realized that writing was more exciting to me than being a doctor. And if I tried to be a doctor and a writer, then both would suffer. — Sergei Lukyanenko

It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well. — Richard Hell

Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer. — Tucker Max

People should think that being a writer is cool. Even if you're just a starving writer. Besides, most great writers were starving at one point or another. It comes with the title. — Zack Love

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block ... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work. — Jonathan Lethem

The genesis of my interest in being a writer can be traced to fourth grade when we listened to a radio production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and I asked the teacher if I could rewrite it for our class to present. Nothing like going head-to-head with the Bard, right?
I can still visualise the pages I filled creating this first "great" literary endeavor. Encouraged by teachers (and one doting grandmother), I went on to write reams of yearbook copy in high school and college and, then, to teach high school English. My "real" writing career didn't begin until I turned from education to the full-time pursuit of storytelling. — Laura Abbot

I'm not sure if people understand what it means to be a writer. It's not like it feels so great. I mean, most of the time you are sitting at your desk and bleeding out onto your computer screen, your notepad, your notebook ... there's a lot of bleeding that goes on when you're a writer! You don't just work to sell books, you work to bind your wounds and put your skin back together again after opening yourself up all over the place! I don't know how other writers write ... but this is how I write. — C. JoyBell C.

What is absolutely true is that any good [Television] series has a specific voice. And I think that voice is almost exclusively the domain of the executive producer ... As a staff writer you're not being called upon to be the great creative person. You're sort of called upon to understand the characters and their voices and put them through certain paces. — Howard Gordon

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself. — Martin Cruz Smith

In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.
So I would suggest that any attempted seduction of a writer would probably go a great deal easier for all parties if you sent them a cheerful note saying "YOU ARE INVITED TO A SEDUCTION: Please come to dinner on Friday Night, Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in."
And alcohol may help, too. Or kissing. Many writers figure out that they're being seduced or flirted with if someone is actually kissing them. — Neil Gaiman

One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone's thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, 'Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.' Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don't want to write, that's great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me. — Sam Lipsyte

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other. — Stanley Fish

I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill. — Walter Cronkite

The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer. — Julie Powell

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech — Flannery O'Connor

Being a writer all boils down to this: It's you, in a chair, staring at a page. And you're either going to stay in that chair until words are written, or you're going to give up and walk away. The great writers have to fight for their words. They have to choose to write, choose words over distractions, and their characters over their friends. Great writers can be lonely, exhausted souls. But through our characters, we live. — Alessandra Torre

Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don't think I'd enjoy being in the same room with him. He's not my kind of person. — Joe Haldeman

Hire great writers If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. — Jason Fried

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people? — Norman Mailer

Being a writer is something I love to do, plus I get independence. It's a great job for a woman because she can work at home and always be there for the children. — Anne Mather

There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist. — Rebecca Makkai

I am frequently asked by people if I would like to be known or remembered for being a Great Poet or a Great Writer. The simple answer is this:
There are many Great Poets and even more Great Writers, thus I answer and say, I would like to be remembered as a capable poet that was a good writer that possessed a truly loving soul, and that all may know, for me, this was great enough. — Tonny K. Brown

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I have been writing now for 3 years, managed to publish 12 books, it's coming along. I can really use you guys support. A great amount of being a writer is having the ability to persist and along the way each book sale with its additional review comments is a win and a reminder that I can make it. Pick up one of my books today and if you like it, tell a friend and maybe will do the same thing. It would be much appreciated. You'll find them on Amazon and Kobo.

Claire — Claire Hamelin Manning

Being a famous writer is great. But there is a limit for it. For what extend can you be famous, and what would you achieve? True, your books will be best sellers, your blog writings and tweets will be hits, fans will love you, and what next? We all die to reach 'there' as budding writers, but once we reach 'it', we think, what next? Is this what we wanted all our lives? To grab all the leading awards, write best sellers, to be loved, to be known and heard? Will they help us achieve inner peace? I believe the utmost important thing is achieving inner peace, not money and fame. A writer should write to achieve inner peace forgetting all other things. Money, fame, fans are not going to last forever, but inner peace is. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like Jesus, but he's not a crutch, he's a teacher. If you want to be a writer, you read the classics. If you want to make great music you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said 'Hi, I have a couple of hours would you like some hints?' would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters: Jesus, Buddha or any other enlightened being. They're geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts just as Beethoven was a genius with music, or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them, follow their lead, study what they were doing right. — Marianne Williamson

Being a good writer meant he could make a living and do as he chose. Being a great one would bring responsibilities and expectations he had no desire to face. — Nora Roberts

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties. — Graham Greene