Quotes of: Professional-writer Keyword

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

This is the same establishment that all those who want, or rather aspire to, to be literary figures of the century, artists, painters and sculptors want acceptance from and approval. They want to be looked up to. Young and upcoming poets must approac...

Feeding The Beasts

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening ...

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minor...

When I Was a Child I Read Books

It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bi...

Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer’s block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I have since used it whenever I myself have been gr...

The City of Dreaming Books

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn ...

Pat Conroy