Fannie Flagg Quotes

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.

What you write chooses you.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

I am a writer. It's like a third arm to me.

Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.

I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face, I’m pretty sure.

Yes, writing is not easy. But can any writer imagine NOT writing?

People say, 'What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?' I say, they don't really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they're gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

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.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go.

I considered calmly that I was born to write.

All I'm about is just the pen.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down."

I don't know when I made that active decision to be a writer or to try to write, but I know I always liked storytelling.

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

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.