Writer Quotes
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I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
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If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.
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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 Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.
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If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
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One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.
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As I found again and again as a writer, when you're completely honest about something, people respond to that.
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When I'm out and about, I'll text or email myself from my phone. A smart phone is a great tool for a writer.
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... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
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I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.
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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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I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.
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I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.
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One has to live a life that creates a writer.
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The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
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If I really knew how to do good storytelling, I would be a writer. Mystery is not a huge part of it. ... It's tension, it's relationships. I think it's a struggle.
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There's a powerful magic about being a writer that I still marvel at.
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By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.
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You can't be a writer if you don't write, it's just that simple.
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Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'
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I'm not a writer. I haven't written anything.
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It is axiomatic among writers that no one ever sues the writer of an unsuccessful book. Just let a book go over twenty-five thousand copies and it is surprising how many people's feelings are hurt, how many screwballs think their brain children have been stolen, and how many people feel that they have been portrayed in a manner calculated to bring infamy upon them.
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Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
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For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.
