Writer Quotes - page 5

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal. (Martin Amis)

Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

John Osborne

I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing.

Alistair Maclean

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.

E. L. Doctorow

I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.

Mickey Spillane

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

John Cheever

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

E. B. White

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

James A. Michener

All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.

Kenneth Tynan

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

John Steinbeck

You cannot teach creativity-how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.” Mario Vargas Llosa. (Mario Vargas Llosa)

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

Paul Simon

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner by planing down your sentences.

Anatole France

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.

William Golding

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

V. S. Naipaul

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

V. S. Naipaul

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

William Wordsworth

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World.

Buchi Emecheta

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

Nicole Krauss

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

André Gide

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it. (Dermot Healy)

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call ''literature'' is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Toni Morrison

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

Elia Kazan

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer

For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

Joseph Brodsky

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