Writer Quotes
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If you're a writer there will come at least one morning in your life when you wake up and want to kill your agent.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.
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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
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Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!
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He the writer must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers.
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Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again.
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The existential writer Albert Camus discovered this truth: “In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”
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I do my best writing between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.. Almost every friend I have who is a consistently productive writer, does their best writing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. My quota is two crappy pages per day. I keep it really low so I'm not so intimidated that I never get started. I will do the gathering of interviews and research throughout the day. I'll get all my notes and materials together and then I'll do the synthesis between 10 p.m. to bed, which is usually 4 or 5 a.m.
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A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
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I never set out to be a published writer.
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You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.
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You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.
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In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn't mean that the singer has changed.
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My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'
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That I was a writer was further proof of God’s far-sightedness; she was convinced that by some magic of propinquity she would acquire a mastery of the English language.
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Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?
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Technically, I could have said “journalist” or “writer.” However, admitting to these professions is like uttering a special secret password to Travel Hell. No one wants journalists or writers in their country because they have a habit of writing things, and sometimes these things are even true.
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You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
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My impression of him, and the impressions of everyone in the office, was he is a very fine lawyer, a very hard worker, a beautiful writer and absolutely, meticulously objective.
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A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
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It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.
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I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
