Writer's Independence Quotes

I am never much interested in the effects of what I write....I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my...books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can't recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion.

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

I didn't want to be a 'Fortune' writer who was constrained in any way.

If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space.

As an actor, you're completely at the mercy of other people. You basically go begging for the opportunity to work. As a writer, at least nobody can tell me what to do. I can write what I want. I might not sell it, but at least I'm in control.

Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.

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 just going to write whatever I'm going to write, and whatever shelf or section they end up on at the bookstore is just going to be that, and I'll let the marketing people pull their hair out and worry about it.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.