concept

writer Quotes

26 of the best book quotes about writer
01
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“Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning. Many years passed before I realized that he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mentally ill.”
Anne Lamott
author
Bird By Bird
book
routines
fathers
early risers
writer
concepts
02
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“You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.”
03
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“If you look around, I think you will find the person you need. Almost every writer I’ve ever known has been able to find someone who could be both a friend and a critic.”
04
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“My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.”
05
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“On a bad day you also don’t need a lot of advice. You just need a little empathy and affirmation. You need to feel once again that other people have confidence in you.”
06
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“Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse.”
07
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“You cannot write out of someone else’s big dark place; you can only write out of your own.”
08
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“Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. ”
09
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“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here.”
10
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“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”
11
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“The atmosphere was heady. One could find a party with relative ease on any day of the week. However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the Lost Generation was hedonistic or irresponsible. As a whole, the various writers of the group maintained high levels of productivity and creativity throughout the turbulent twenties.”
12
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“No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
13
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“And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious floods of eloquence Have issued?”
Virgil
character
14
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“The only advice for a writer is to read.”
advice
writer
to read
concepts
15
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“You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.”
16
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“I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.”
17
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“I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As for me, I am past human help or hope.”
18
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“You’re not required to save the world with your creativity. Your art not only doesn’t have to be original, in other words, it also doesn’t have to be important. For example, whenever anyone tells me that they want to write a book in order to help other people I always think ‘Oh, please don’t. Please don’t try to help me.’ I mean it’s very kind of you to help people, but please don’t make it your sole creative motive because we will feel the weight of your heavy intention, and it will put a strain upon our souls.”
19
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“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
20
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“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
21
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“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
22
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“So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”
23
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“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
24
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“And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn’t have written even one poem if she’d had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for.”
25
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“Jessica Vye you are a writer beyond all possible doubt!”
26
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“I guess it’s like, in my head, my writing can be as great as I want it to be. But as soon as I declare I’m a writer, I’ll have something to prove. It’s hard to admit that you think you’re good at something creative. And then it’s so much worse for women. We’re told to shrug off compliments, to scoff when someone tells us we’re good at something. We shrink ourselves, convincing ourselves what we’re creating doesn’t actually matter.”

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