Quotes About Author

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

I'm a writer more than I am a talker.

For a writer, for the solitude to write, you don't need a room of your own, you need a house.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.

I read tons of comic books. My favourite is Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic writer.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.

One of the great rewards of a writer's life is that it lets you read all the books you want to without feeling guilty.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer.

I think any writer is a fool if he doesn't do it for money. There needs to be some kind of incentive in addition to the project. It all goes together. It's fun to sit there and think of characters and get them into action, then be paid for it.

My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.

A writer just speaks from his heart, mind and soul. They are the conscience keepers of the society. They are the keepers of the soul of the society.

As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.

Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

There are plenty of paths to becoming a writer, but I think the most reliable ones involve total commitment: writing for magazines and newspapers, teaching writing, editing books, representing authors.

'Doctor Who' is part of my science fictional DNA. You could take it out of me, and I'd probably still have ended up being a writer, but almost certainly not the same one.