Writer Quotes

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

As a male writer, women are always what men pursue, and their world is always a mystery. So I always tried to present as many views as possible on women's worlds.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.

If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying.

I suppose I'm most influenced by any good, commercial writer. I learn from everyone.

Everybody I know is a joke writer.

I want to go to college. I'm going to take four years off. I don't want to miss that. I want to be a writer. I think that'd be awesome.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

I'm a fairly undisciplined writer.

No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to new ways of seeing the work, and different approaches to certain creative challenges.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

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

I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

The first job of a writer is to be honest.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.