Writers - Quotes

Everybody wants to feel that you're writing to a certain demographic because that's good business, but I've never done that ... I tried to write stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to read?... I don't think you can do your best work if you're writing for somebody else, because you never know what that somebody else really thinks or wants. - Stan Lee

Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Everything you look at can be turned into a story ... you can make a tale of everything you touch. - Hans Christian Andersen

Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through. - Markus Zusak

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it. - Hunter S. Thompson

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life. - Martin Amis

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure. - Eudora Welty

Fine writing is generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a laboured style. - William Shenstone

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. - Octavia E. Butler

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it. - Ursula K. le Guin

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. - Ernest Hemingway

For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. - Dan Simmons