Writer Quotes

I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an "old" young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.

I'm pleased to have outsold great writers. But I'm not insane - I realize I am a writer people buy to take on vacation.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.

A writer can write in an attic, or on top of a bus. Or with a sharp stick in some wet cement. To act, an actor has to have words. A stage. a camera turning.

I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

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

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Mystery writing involves solving a puzzle, but 'high suspense' writing is a situation whereby the writer thrusts the hero/heroine into high drama.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

When you're an actor working in the theater, you would never say anything to the writer, never alter the dialogue, never dream to ask for changes.

The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.

In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

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.