Writers Quotes - Page 3

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

I wasn't born to cook or clean,
but to read and write,
if you don't like me the way I am,
then go fly a kite.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor -thank Heaven!-always Storm.

Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.

(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours.

Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I began a new story. My characters are my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).