A Quote by Paulo Coelho

When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works. — © Paulo Coelho
When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.
I want to be identified as a writer, not a Southern writer, not a woman writer, not a woman from this or that place, but unfortunately it doesn't always happen.
I say "on principle" [regarding 'lesbian writer'] because whenever you get one of your minority labels applied, like "Irish Writer," "Canadian Writer," "Woman Writer," "Lesbian Writer" - any of those categories - you always slightly wince because you're afraid that people will think that means you're only going to write about Canada or Ireland, you know.
Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer. I'm a writer who's been strongly influenced by European precedents. I'm a writer who feels very close to literary practice in India - which I go to quite often - and to writers over there.
Of course I'm a black writer... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
I want to direct in Denmark. I married a writer; my best friend's a writer, so I always wanted to be a writer.
People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
The nightmare of censorship has always cast a shadow over my thoughts. Both under the previous state and under the Islamic state, I have said again and again that, when there is an apparatus for censorship that filters all writing, an apparatus comes into being in every writer's mind that says: "Don't write this, they won't allow it to be published." But the true writer must ignore these murmurings. The true writer must write. In the end, it will be published one day, on the condition that the writer writes the truth and does not dissemble.
Any adjective you put before the noun 'writer' is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it's feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.
I never wanted to be a celebrity writer. I wanted to be a good writer. I'm still trying to be a good writer. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.
If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.
I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.
I'm an African-American writer, I'm a lazy writer, I'm a writer who likes to watch The Wire, I'm a writer who likes to eat a lot of steak.
I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
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