Quotes of: American-writers Keyword

Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true.

Sara Sheridan

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

Love

Everybody wants to be part of a success story, But no one want to be the writer of this story.

Life

Characters have to be seen and felt when written, not told about. Writers are merely vessels of their manifestations.

Love

Some days being a writer consists of telling yourself you aren't insane, your characters are.

Love

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

V. S. Naipaul

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

W. H. Auden

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

William Faulkner

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.

Walter Kirn

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

William Saroyan

Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

Y.S. Lee

I am too much of an imitator to be a true writer.

Zia Haider Rahman

People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

Anatole Broyard

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

Brian Moore

All writers want to know that someone is reading their work, taking them seriously. It provides a kind of moral support.

Felice Picano

I've always loved brainstorming with other writers, and I consider having my work critiqued a part of that brainstorming.

Jay Asher

I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.

James Frey

Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Russell Baker

If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.

Shel Silverstein

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of ...

Collected Fiction