Quotes About Writer

I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

It's just one of those things. When you're a wrestler you're thinking about one guy, yourself, your character and whatever guy it is you're working with. When you're a writer and you're kind of in a booking type role, you're thinking about the entire roster so you're thinking about wrestling 24 hours a day.

I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

Tina Fey is a genius - I've seen it with my own eyes now. She's a very observant person, and I've never seen somebody write such a high volume or as quickly as she does.

Plagiarism is one of the great academic sins. It has the power to destroy a scholar or writer and turn a lifetime's work to dust.

History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

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

Nostalgia is a sweet place for a poet and writer to be in. But it's an indulgence; a distraction. You can't live in a distraction.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

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.

The real world is the fantasy writer's scrapbook. Real history, real geography, real customs and religions are all invaluable sources of guidance and inspiration.

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.