Writers Quotes - Page 7

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.

A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.

But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

This story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.

...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only when you begin to look inward that you can begin to have an effect on those out there, the ones with the greedy eyes and outstretched hands.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted,
and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do - a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; ... a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.

...writing surrounds us: it's not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments - moments of sustained creation - when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.