The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
I'm a writer. I write not only for a living, I write because I'm a writer.
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.
I can only write what I would be interested in.
Many writers are neither spirit nor wine, but rather spirits- of-wine: they can catch fire, and then they give off heat.
The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.
The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.
I've seen enough successful writers who no longer seem to care when they are recognized with an award, and I think that's just tragic.
I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.
The only thing that makes me crazier than writing is not writing.
I think you can spread yourself across any number of genres when you're a writer as long as you have a deep, abiding love for each of them.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.
I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.
I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.
I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying.
Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.
I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.
Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.
Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.
I love convincing a reader that an unusual or seemingly ordinary subject is worth his or her time - it's part of the fun for me as a writer.
I don't want to write because I have to; I want to write because I want to. Sometimes, when writers write because they have to, the results are disastrous.
