What Does A Writer Do Quotes

#1. The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do ... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

Donald Barthelme

#2. W. P. Kinsella, who was born on a farm near Edmunton, Alberta, has earned wide recognition for his wild imagination and rash humor as a writer.

Gerald Vizenor

#3. When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.

Sophie Hannah

#4. And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.

Paul Fussell

#5. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.

Ciaran Carson

#6. Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong.

Caitlin Horrocks

#7. I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

Avi

#8. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Gerald Brenan

#9. A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

Baron De Montesquieu

#10. Telling what must not be told is one of the writer's primary tasks. It is also a difficult and dangerous one.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#11. To do justice to a lifelong dream of being a writer, I must give it the intense concentration and focus I gave to track. To do both with excellence is not possible. It is with a sense of sadness and joyous anticipation that I leave track and move on.

Florence Griffith Joyner

#12. Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Niall Williams

#13. Teach the writer, not the writing.

Lucy Calkins

#14. It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

Amy Tan

#15. A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

Joshua Ferris

#16. The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

George Saunders

#17. Steve Yarbrough is a writer of many gifts, but what makes Safe from the Neighbors such a magnificent achievement is its moral complexity ... Safe from the Neighbors does what only the best novels can do; after reading it, we can never see the world, or ourselves, in quite the same way.

Ron Rash

#18. A writer fills the paper with the pictures of perception, experience, and feeling of real and imaginative lives.

Debasish Mridha

#19. The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

Donald Barthelme

#20. I feel a passion for what we're trying to do.I mean, why does somebody who's old who's a writer keep writing? Because that's who they are.

Charles Koch

#21. What is the difference between an author and a writer? A writer, as we know, writes; an author has written. What does an author do? Auth? Authorize? An author authors. But never in the present tense. No one says, when asked what he or she is doing, I'm authoring.

Roy Blount Jr.

#22. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Stephen Fry

#23. I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

Richard Price

#24. We must remember that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people are capable of having done to them.

T. S. Eliot

#25. I have never seen a food writer mention this, but all shrimp imported into the United States must first be washed in chlorine bleach to kill bugs. What this does for the taste, I do not know, but I think we should be told.

Charles Clover

#26. What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Jorge Luis Borges

#27. Writers are people whose words speak louder than their actions.

Shon Mehta

#28. Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

Sara Sheridan

#29. As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.

Candice Millard

#30. The author apologizes for being unable to afford a ghost writer, which explains the lack of a distinctive prose style.

Richard Armour

#31. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

Gore Vidal

#32. I really want my career to be as an actor-writer-director-producer, you know? I don't know what will be stronger than the other.

Danny Strong

#33. A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

Anna Quindlen

#34. A Writer is a writer, no matter what s/he writes.

Gabriella Slade

#35. As a writer, you sit around a computer all day, and it's too easy to open another tab and keep Rotten Tomatoes there.

Evan Daugherty

#36. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#37. Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed.

Emily Fridlund

#38. The public has no idea that writing is a disease, and that the writer who publishes is like a beggar who exhibits his sores.

Michael Kruger

#39. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

Jane Yolen

#40. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

Flannery O'Connor

#41. This assignment could damn well project all the words across my face and the ink stain my hands a gory mess before I finished it.

Jazz Feylynn

#42. Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

Augusten Burroughs

#43. I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.

Meghan Daum

#44. If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Louis L'Amour

#45. London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the

William Shakespeare

#46. For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,

Mark Bowden

#47. Robert Frost said, No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Kim Addonizio

#48. People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist.

Monica Ali

#49. A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.

Flannery O'Connor

#50. To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

Anne Lamott

#51. Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#52. I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.

Rodman Philbrick

#53. Every story holds insight into the writer's soul. If the soul can't be found, the writer didn't bleed enough.

M.L. Stephens

#54. No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.

Alfred De Vigny