Writer's Dilemma Quotes

I've published a couple of short novels in France that I didn't want to publish in English because I loved the characters too much to subject them to American critics who were not exactly favorable toward my work.

It is a grand thing to get advice and criticism of people who really want to make more useful such things as any of us poor scribes write for the general public. There is just one bit of cheer, however, no matter how much we improve, everyone will never be pleased and therefore we may hope that everyone will never be displeased either.

As a writer, you're always trying to say the best thing. You're always thinking about what's the best thing to say, and what's the hardest way to say it, and what's the best line? Sometimes the best line is the simplest line. Sometimes the best line is the line that evokes more feeling than actual wordsmithing.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

I am never going to write about dogs again. You can write about Islam, you can write about sexuality, but no, not dogs.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.

Anything I write I ask myself: Is it true, is it entertaining?

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.

You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you're a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.

Your worst enemy as a writer - especially one working online a lot of the time - is obscurity.

For me, as a writer, I desperately want to be read. I'm very conscious of readers as I'm writing. I think, 'If you write for yourself, then why don't you just keep it under the bed,' so I definitely write for other people.

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

Whenever I wrote fiction, people always seemed to think that what I wrote was true, that it was entirely autobiographical. And when I would write non-fiction, they often accused me of exaggeration and fictionalization.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

Usually if a scene's really hard to write, I just don't write it. Nothing's coming to mind.

It's always a mistake for writers to key their submissions to world events, because they move so quickly and unpredictably, as has certainly proven the case in Afghanistan.