Quotes About Writer

This is the life I live, and this is the stuff I experience. And like any good writer, I should just write about what goes in my life and what goes on around me. So that's what I chose to do.

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer.

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.

Love wasn't everything. Women weren't everything. A writer had to conserve his energies.

what makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth...

is the writer a prophet or priest - does he show the truth or serve the truth?...

If I ever got sloppy and maudlin, it would be for the streets of my childhood—but no self- respecting writer should ever eulogize a slum...

a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....

Some time ago I discovered that I could no longer speak aloud or read aloud from a stage, even for the sake of hearing the effect that my writer's voice produced on listeners. Now, curiously, the more I merely try to live, the more reclusive I become, the vainer I am. At last I am as vain as the one who instantly voices his silence inside me.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

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.

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man who with those words issued a license to misery to millions of underexperienced teenagers and thousands of overeducated middle-aged jackasses.

Love is the only energy I've ever used as a writer. I've never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

Cree en ti , pero no tanto; duda de ti, pero no tanto. Cuando sientas duda, cree; cuando creas, duda. En esto estriba la única verdadera sabiduría que puede acompañar a un escritor.

I don't remember which writer of antiquity it is who speaks of an Old Woman-Devil, armed with a double set of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her sex. . . . What is the meaning of the vulva-with-teeth if not the devouring nonengendering principle of the woman?

I took the book and placed it in the section for "new arrivals" and just looked at it there. Nothing I had ever done as a writer made me prouder than seeing my novel on a shelf in my childhood library.

Different people have different styles, but there is an opportunity as a director to be a writer in every moment, with every visual cue and every piece of production design. Everything is a decision, and everything can be obsessed over.

Obama is a very fine writer with an excellent command of language. His memoir 'Dreams From My Father' is a fine book, but it will not rank as one of the great autobiographies.