Quotes of: Professional-writer Keyword

...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.

The Everyday Writer

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Fahrenheit 451

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

The Forest for the Trees

What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us.

Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.

The Girls

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

The Genius of Christianity or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

She doesn't understand that a writer is a special creature--that I'm different from everyone else. I'm not saying I'm superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess.

Bloodsucking Fiends

Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

The Black Dagger Brotherhood: An Insider's Guide

The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.

Beginner's Luke

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Basic Verities, Prose, and Poetry

Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.

Barracuda

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.

Book of Sketches

There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts.

The Black Tulip

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Paul Auster

I grew up in the suburbs among highly educated people, in a house crammed with books. It was a culture rich in ideas, stimulation, entertainment, and mental activity, all helpful to the nurture of an imaginative child who wanted from an early age to ...

Stephen Hunter

Clark Gregg and I are around the same age. He has been an actor and is a writer. But with a first-time director, there is a way to talk about things they might not know. Because Clark was an actor, though, he knew more about the process than most fir...

Sam Rockwell

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.

Tess Gerritsen