Writer Quotes

I've yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine, and we have a tendency to treat them like that.

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

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

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

My dad was a sports writer when I was younger and then he became just a general columnist. But I grew up with him literally getting into brawls with football coaches.

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.

The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

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.

The main engagement of the writer is towards truthfulness; therefore he must keep his mind and his judgement free.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.

I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef,' I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

Where I came from, no one was a writer.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that.

I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

Movies don't look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody's character right and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it's creating a puzzle. Yes, having been a writer for so long, I have an awareness of when things are going awry, but it doesn't mean I know how to fix them.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

And I definitely wanted to be a writer, but I felt a duty now, having used up those educational resources, I felt a duty to the church and my parents to become a priest.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

I became a writer in spite of my environments.

You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

I'm a singer and a writer first. I started to rap by accident, being playful.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

I've basically thought of myself as a writer, whether I was or not.