Writer Quotes

Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his...

So what do I do? What do we do? How do we move forward when we are tired and afraid? What do we do w...

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like anothe...

Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not,...

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a...

...a great future behind him, already

I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to...

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who...

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the ea...

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing ...

But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at ...

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost...

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your ...

There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that ...

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wrac...

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where ...

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing ...

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts....

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can g...

You, know, the only thing I can be is a writer. I'm absolutely unprepared for anything else. When yo...

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes...

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers...

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," I...

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes...

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I en...

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class Fra...

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. ...

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious new...

For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries—to read the best authors, observe the ...

Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wideThe chance won't come aga...

She's got everything she needs; she's an artist, she don't look back.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up...

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. N...

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of

You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so g...

Yet should there hover in their restless headsOne thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,Which ...

To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageou...

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear ...

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, wi...

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder...

As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul.

When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'...

My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day c...

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they mus...

I am a writer. Therefore. I am not sane.

If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about s...

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom ...

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...