528 quotes found
“Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.”
“When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed”
“One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.”
“You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.”
“...she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.”
“He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.”
“An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other b...”
“How become a writer? Naturally.”
“Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.”
“Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.”
“I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.”
“Writers are born, not created.”
“Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.”
“It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.”
“I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.”
“Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without fr...”
“A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.”
“It's not that [writers] are pompous jerks. We are insecure. We feel like we're fading away in this vast sea of scriveners.”
“No matter what level of success, there is no such thing as a secure writer”
“Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on ...”
