Quotes of: Professional-writer Keyword

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.

Malcolm X

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

Marguerite Young

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

Markus Zusak

That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

Markus Zusak

It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.

Naveen Andrews

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Nicholson Baker

Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.

Nick Flynn

For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.

Neil Gaiman

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

Nicola Griffith

The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.

Nikki Giovanni

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

Nick Hornby

A crime is like a crack in reality, and it is the author's role to explore those cracks. As a writer, I like to see how they impinge on people.

Natsuo Kirino

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Nicole Krauss

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Cyril Connolly

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Paul Harding

A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.

The Watchman of Ephraim

We've all had that experience where we hear a song that we've liked for many years, and we finally hear what the writer tells us what it's about, and you're often disappointed.

Jakob Dylan

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

Jane Hirshfield

The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.

John Scott

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

Rachel Kushner