Top 1200 Professional Writer Quotes & Sayings - Page 12

I am a super-confident writer, and as a joke writer and as an actress, I'm like, 'I want to go head-to-head with every person.' I am an Indian woman and I'm a kind of double minority in this world.

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.

Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque. So you get that kind of shortfall between the actual experience of the writer and the things he's hungry to express and the voice itself.

My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.

I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things.

I am not a slow writer, I am not a fast writer . . . I am a half-fast writer.

That's a really good question - what is it like living with a writer? I guess it depends on the writer. You know what? They live in a fantasy world a lot of the time. My husband lives in a fantasy world.

I'm looking for a writer who doesn't know where the sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love, a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones who know her so well, the ones with the power to accuse and condemn in the blink of an eye. It's all right that she doesn't know what she's thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she's arrived.

When you get hit that's when you've got to be calm. A professional fighter has to learn how to hit and not get hit, and at the same time be exciting. That's what professional boxing is about. You've got to be clever, you've got to be smart, and not get hit, and when you're able to do this, you're a fighter.

As a writer, my goal, (which I'm never going to achieve, and I know that, and no writer can achieve that,) but my goal is to make you almost live the books. I want you to fall through that page and feel as if these things are happening to you.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

A popular writer writes about what people think. A wise writer offers them something to think about.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

I realized the other day that about the only author I genuinely read for pure pleasure is one of the worst authors in the world, a guy called Harry Stephen Keeler, a long dead American mystery writer. He was probably the greatest bad writer America ever produced.

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.

I don't think I ever have trouble with writer's block. It's different when you make it up as you go - that means you're going to get stuck. I wouldn't call it writer's block, I'd say, "I don't know where the hell this story is going."

I didn't really think I would be a musician. I always thought I'd be a writer. I wanted to be a writer in college, but I thought I could be a better musician. I loved the process of writing music and lyrics more than I loved the process of sitting at my computer and writing. Because of that, I thought I would be a better musician than a writer.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

First of all you are a writer, a writer is what you are, so it doesn't actually stop the moment you leave your desk, your computer, your keyboard, whatever. Something is operating the back of your mind.

You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then... you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.

I never really wanted to be a journalist, honestly. I always wanted to be a writer, and I thought the only way to apply that interest was with journalism - when you're young and you want to be a writer, it seems like the most practical thing to do with those types of ambitions.

And I am a writer, writer of fictions I am the heart that you call home And I've written pages upon pages Trying to rid you from my bones.

The weirdest thing to me is that magazines would never do this for their writers. They would never hire a writer who writes for another magazine; they want to have their own stable of writers. Newsweek would never hire a TIME writer, and TIME would never hire a Newsweek writer - but they would both hire the same photographer to shoot a cover for them.

I had it in my head when I was in college that I wanted to be a writer, but it took me a long time to commit to being a writer. Up until then, I had worked one dead-end job after another while writing on the side.

When I started in comics, people were always trying to classify me as either/or. Either a writer who appealed to women or a writer who appealed to guys. This need to categorize was just exhausting.

It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.

As I've become a professional, I just feel more pressure to produce, to score goals and get assists. I know I'm a good player, but it gives evidence of how good you are if you're able to look at how many passes you've made in a game or how many chances you create. It's in the books. It's become more about stats as I've become a professional.

As much as I'm enjoying stuff out here in Hollywood, I will always think of myself as a comic-book writer who does film and television, not a film and TV writer who occasionally does comics.

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.

I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

I loved Cookie [Mueller]. She was a much better writer than actress. She shouldn't have stuck with me in the beginning; she should have immediately become a writer. She would have had more of a chance.

They don't mind getting punched in the face and, more importantly, they don't mind punching other people in the face. I'm just about the movies; I enjoy the dexterity of actors in action movies and the choreography side of things. You've just got to be a different person to be a professional fighter. I train with professional fighters so I know what it takes. It's a very difficult profession, probably harder then the acting profession.

The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type - as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer - an insipid one or a clumsy one - but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years - as producers did - who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.

I wanted to be a writer first, and I struck out in the world to be a writer first, and then found stand-up as a more creative outlet, as a 3D way to be creative.

I have a very high respect for professional comedians. What they do astonishes me. You have to be really smart and absorb everything, repackage it, bring it back to the person, and make them laugh at themselves. I can make people laugh during my talks because they didn't come to have me make them laugh. It's added value. So my job is way easier than that of a professional comic.

I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.

I think if you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them be an observer kind of all the time. And that's a great way to make a writer.

I've always defined myself as a writer, I've never decided what it was I was gonna write. [...] I always fancied myself one, but I'm not. I'm so far from a writer.

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

I think it's all to the good that a writer shouldn't be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may be famous, he may be pandering to the mob, celebrity and so on.

I'm a writer. I write not only for a living, I write because I'm a writer.

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

I care about actors, and I understand them in a very personal way. I'm not saying every writer has to do that, but in my case, it's been helpful. I can put myself into the scene and think, 'What would it be like to act this?' Any writer who's really good probably does that to some extent.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

Someday, as an exercise, you might ask a writer to give himself the questions he wants to answer. If you really want a writer's opinions, you have to ask for them. What you read might surprise you.

A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

I'm very much, like, 'We've all got to help each other.' If there's a new female writer, I'm much more likely to read her book than if it's by a new male writer.

Ross McDonald had a greater influence on me than any other writer. His style of writing, the repeated theme of the past coming out to grab somebody, that's very attractive to me as a reader and, now, as a writer.