Quotes of: Professional-writer Keyword

These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults. Which may be farther put beyond dispute by the following demonstration: that whoever will examine the writings ...

A Tale of a Tub and Other Works

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you ...

Madeleine L'Engle

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain ...

David Mitchell

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook

A kind of losing loadum is their game, Where the worst writer has the greatest fame.

The Complete Poems

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

The Crack-Up

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Death in the Afternoon

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

A true writer cuts their heart open and lets it bleed all over the page... ~Cynthia Batten

The Eyes of Alexander

It is so small secret that many writers are also alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, or habitual wearers of blue jeans (in some cases all of the above).

Editorial

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Ernest Hemingway on Writing

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Flaubert's Parrot

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

Flaubert's Parrot

...a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....

A Familiar Rain

...to know an other's interior life you are his confessor or a writer - the one is admitted freely, the other intrudes by discerning of spirits

A Familiar Rain

...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...

A Familiar Rain

...it's good to know wave and particle alpha code, but more than that, the writer must go to the heart of life ...

A Familiar Rain

...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...

A Familiar Rain

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

The Forest for the Trees

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction