Writing Identity Quotes

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.

Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself.

Trust me, I did not set out to establish three pen names and, for the record, I do not recommend it as a career strategy. The idea back at the start was that I would stick with the name that proved most successful.

Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

I think you can't help but write in your own voice.

I've never thought of myself as a writer. I still don't, despite all the writing I've done.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

I think that screenwriting probably isn't seen as writing in the same way that novel-writing is seen as writing. But I certainly don't see it that way.

And I can't think of a reason I'd ever use a pseudonym, as I wouldn't want to publish something that I didn't like enough to put my name on it.

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

Seriously, I don't consider myself a writer. I don't think I have writing talent. But I will continue to do it.

I'm a poet, first and foremost as a writer. That's who I am. That's what I'm most comfortable writing.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

You don't make a decision about being a writer. There was a point, aged 21, when it became clear that this is who I am. The choice is how good you are going to be at it and how hard you are going to work.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

Never believe anything you think about yourself as a writer when you're not writing.

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

'Mira Grant' is actually my pseudonym. And 'Seanan' is pronounced 'SHAWN-in.'

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.

I've learned to accept that I'm a children's writer, even if it's not what I set out to become. It's what I should have been all along, and I'll stay in this role as long as I'm a writer.