Writer Quotes

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.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.

I worked for half a cent a word. I'm not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things.

Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

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

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

I've always felt that I would rather see an actor, writer, or musician's work, rather than actually know the person. If you know too much about an artist, it somehow lessens their ability to do their work as well.

Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

Nothing would make me happier if Peter Falk would finally win his Oscar for this. Not just as the writer but as a fan and a friend. It would be so great.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

The homosexual community wants me to be gay. The heterosexual community wants me to be straight. Every writer thinks, I'm the journalist who's going to make him talk. I pray for them. I pray that they get a life and stop living mine!

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You're playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It's hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter'. He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk.

Whatever you do, make sure you want to write more than you want to be a writer. Make sure you want to act more than you want to be an actor. That is what will sustain you.