Quotes About Writer

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy.

I've always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people's books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer's imagination.

Growth of the Soil by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. The copy he gave me had once belonged to Norma M. Saylor, who lived in Palmyra, New Jersey.

The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote. That's what my writing was. Messages in bottles.

Jonah, being a writer, is a slow learner, stubborn, self-righteous, not given to trust [ Out of the Garden ].

In my reading, I sought a contemporary, someone who lived what I thought of as my "other life," the one not lived, but so lavishly imagined and desired that it felt not like another life, but a version of my own. You feel—I did—deep contentment when you find such a life expressed by a writer who has lived it, as if in reading that life you (sort of) live it too.

No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to so many beset people now—solitude suggests not loneliness, but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity.

I was seeing what a writer can do with the tatters of truth, the unfinished stories that give us no rest.

This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Si un escritor se pone muy enfermo, todo se detiene. Si se muere, su negocio se acaba para siempre. En este sentido, la carrera de un escritor popular se parece más a la de un famoso actor, pero hasta el actor más famoso tiene un suplente. Un escritor no. Nadie puede sustituirle. Su voz personal lo es todo. Y esto es especialmente cierto en el caso de una escritor popular que ya está en proceso de ser publicado por entregas en una revista de tirada nacional.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Silenus returns to himself in that process of allowing the world to rush in once more, much like the return of the senses following orgasm. Only the descent of the writer to the world was more painful as he or she returned, trailing clouds of glory which quickly dissipated in the mundane flow of sensory trivia.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin. It was to be a writer, and I wanted in.

Daniel Defoe—arguably the most prolific writer in the English language and considered by many the father of the novel and the founder of modern journalism—

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

Now I will be anything else you please, except dull. You may say I have been dull already? As I am an honest woman, I don't agree with you. There are some people who bring dull minds to their reading - and them blame the writer for it. I say no more.

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination.

Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you will find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

I think the story compels its own style to a great extent that the writer don't need to bother too much about style. If he's bothering about style, then he's going to write precious emptiness–-not necessarily nonsense... it'll be quite beautiful and quite pleasing to the ear, but there won't be much content in it. ~William Faulkner~

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.