Writer Quotes

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...

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my w...

I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot wa...

The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views up...

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.

No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, th...

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties,...

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style...

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with th...

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at leas...

You can never know enough about your characters

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blo...

Sometimes a famous subject may even outlive his own obituary writer.

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is natur...

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is natur...

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is natur...

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is natur...

There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. ...

But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me t...

What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented wi...

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous"...

Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figu...

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If...

Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like t...

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to re...

Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush a...

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If...

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush a...

...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.

I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the d...

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom...

But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer...

The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that neede...

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mot...

Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was ...

I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the ...

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected...

There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leav...

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'...