Writer Quotes
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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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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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Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
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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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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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Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!
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You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.
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I do find that people are incredibly naive about what it is to be a writer. Like you would pay an incredible amount of money for an MFA program and still not have the slightest idea of how one goes about becoming a writer. So, I'm always flabbergasted when people say, "Oh, I was invited to do a reading, but I'm not going to read because I don't have a book.".
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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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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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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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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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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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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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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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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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I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
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A catless writer is almost inconceivable.
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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 is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
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It’s just that everything is so . . . unreliable lately.” “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water,” he said. “Is that a quote?” He nodded. “Rabindranath Tagore. He’s a great writer. You should read him.
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Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
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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.
