Writer Quotes

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. ...

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of oth...

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows an...

Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on...

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have ...

Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the dispo...

There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson,...

I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a sym...

The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy t...

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questi...

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way...

The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obvio...

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to aba...

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restles...

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development....

It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time yo...

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection o...

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mi...

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to sur...

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but ...

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably b...

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers,...

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for peopl...

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower ...

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by...

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writer...

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just ...

For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table with while Amanda sl...

You have always wanted to be a writer. Getting the job at the magazine was only your first step towa...

Be yourself. The world worships the original.

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those thi...

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Among the responsibilities of any writer is that, no matter what else, they know what they mean. So,...

She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the ...

The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their ...

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed...

Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly a...

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, ea...

As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.

You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer!" Miss Frost said. "It's not a career choic...

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't te...

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearan...

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you in...

If we eliminate the word "writer", if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming w...

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves ...

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workin...

The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. Y...

It’s not about fancy literary prizes. It’s not about seeming impenetrable or smart or high fallutin....

A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after...

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of f...

You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover wi...

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action,and becau...

Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on ...

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a des...

I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes.

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupat...

You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspir...

I earned a mater's degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer. Instead ...

As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morn...

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

When you are young and strong...you can stay alive on your hatred"....but realized later "They can ...

If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

I see the game now. You can't write with ink, and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but y...

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and t...

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour a...

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd...

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look a...

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his be...

Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always t...

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours ...

...but [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the ...

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.

A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.

A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. T...

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn't it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but ...

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or...

The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small ...

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beg...

Most people put off my mother's erratic behavior to the fact that she was a writer, as if that just ...

If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit

Do you drink?""Of course,I just said I was a writer.

When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time.

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically corre...

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, the...