Writer Quotes - Page 2

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest.
If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I don't think all writers are sad, she said.
I think it's the other way around -
all sad people write.

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme - and when you so give yourself - you lose appetite ans sleep - it cannot be helped -

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public.

Sometimes writing everyday is like pulling teeth, painful, but necessary.

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

I fix the cramped, lined pages
with my curious stare. How do you
come to exist?

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

And so I just kept writing to myself.

If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.