Writer Quotes

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

You know, that's kind of the thing, I can't freestyle and I used to always wonder why I couldn't, and when I would try once out of every six months, but I was always a great writer!

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.

I've always thought of myself as an organic writer, rather than a cerebral one. I feel my way along as I go, hoping I'll get to the place I intend to reach.

I am an old, old friend of Aaron Sorkin's, who is the executive producer and writer. He had been talking about doing a political show for a long time and I had been interested in it for a long time. The moment I became available, he called me last year and asked me if I wanted to do it and then I just had to audition for the powers that be, and I got it.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.

The best way for me to procrastinate as a writer is research.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

I've always been a very prolific writer.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.