Writer Quotes

As long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

How do I tell people who I am? Not being a writer, the only way is to sing songs that reflect my opinions.

There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.

I'm a better writer than I am a singer, and I express myself easily through writing.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.

When you're an author, you're always two people. Jasper the writer is different from Jasper the person at home.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

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

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

I'm a fairly undisciplined writer.

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

The writer's room is a really interesting place to be.

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

I'm not the most detailed writer. I have a tendency to be more action-oriented vs. descriptive.

I'm not a disciplined writer.

George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field.

Becoming a mother has helped make me a tougher, stronger writer.

I don't think of myself as a director or writer. I think of myself as a filmmaker.

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.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

I am a writer of fragments.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.

You have to pretend to live in those clothes that they lived in, to live within the climate that they had then. You have to imagine with the help, obviously, of all the other technicians that are around - the writer, the director, the other actors.

I'm not a great writer.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.

I am a super-confident writer, and as a joke writer and as an actress, I'm like, 'I want to go head-to-head with every person.' I am an Indian woman and I'm a kind of double minority in this world.

I'm not as good a writer as I'd like to be; therefore, I like to use images to tell stories.

I am also a writer. That is a fact not known by the public in general.

This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.

The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail.

And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

If I can make a living as a writer, I can do anything.

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

It is one test of a fully developed writer that he reminds us of no one but himself.

It's rare to work on a series without a writer. If you have a question about a line, then phone calls have to be made.

I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.

It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

The writer is all alone.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.