Writer Quotes

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

I think people are starting to think of me less as an actor and more as a writer.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!

The epiphany for me was that I wasn't a writer, and I had to do something with these texts. I put them in the streets as posters.

I think with every writer there are two people there.

Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.

The writer's shortness of breath became more and more distressing as he rose.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.

Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.

It was in New York, and I've always wanted to film in New York. And the writer was a teenage friend of mine. We did youth theatre together when we were 16 and always had a dream of making a film together. And ten years later, we've done it. So it's great.

I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat.

I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.

I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.

You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.

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

I've been a writer for 42 years and, yes, it is a full time job for me. Not a hobby, but serious work.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer.

I don't practice, but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals, and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need.