Writer's Purpose Quotes

The number one person who needs my books is me. I'm not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out and is handing things out to the poor people who might not have life worked out.

The most annoying and full-of-crap thing a writer says is, 'I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it.' A writer without a reader doesn't exist.

Most writers write to say something about other people - and it doesn't last. Good writers write to find out about themselves - and it lasts forever.

When I'm writing, it's because I'm trying to figure something out for myself. If I don't believe in what I've written, then how can I expect anyone else to believe in that, either?

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

My mission as a writer is to give my readers hope to carry with them, and to promote a belief that they can do anything they set their minds to.

If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

I find that most books that I don't like are those in which the authors have indulged themselves. I can almost sense when they're writing something for themselves.

I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.

I feel as long as people enjoy what they read and learn something more, I have done my job as a writer.

One of my favorite pieces of advice about being a writer came from a very formative teacher I had as an undergraduate, named John Hersey. On our last day of class together, which was also John Hersey last day before retirement, he said, "Remember, the world doesn't need any new writers." Which at first didn't seem like great advice, but when you unpacked it, it was really that it's not enough to be confident in what you do; be conscious of bringing something to the world of readers and writers that it hasn't seen before. Something idiosyncratic.

I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.

I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.