Writer Quotes

To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

I'm not the slowest writer that you know.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

An artist can go paint, and a writer can go write, but an actor needs to get hired, needs somebody to say, 'Here, come and do this,' That's the hard part.

I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

Not having any real direction, one writer would lead me to another.

Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time.

A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.

I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

I'm more of a writer than an actor, and I used to say that I'm mostly an improviser, though I haven't improvised in awhile.

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

He would catapult you forward, and that was his intention with the Jazz Messengers. He would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I am a writer of the textbooks of scientology.

I turned down twelve films last year... Huge money films, but I had no respect for the writer or the work.

That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

The acting is something that will always be a part of my life, but the writing gives me a lot more creative freedom. You're a pawn in somebody else's chess game, whereas as a writer and as a director, you get to call the shots. And that's very thrilling.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

I'm a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else.