Quotes on Writer

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

I've heard some writers say things like, 'Well, I'm a professional writer. I only start books I know I can finish.' I look at it maybe the other way: I only want to write books I'm not sure I can write.

Literature taught me that I wasn't alone, that I could become a writer if I worked at it, that my story mattered. Whether a young reader becomes a writer or not, they deserve to know that their story, whatever it may be, is important.

It's so easy, as a writer, to get stuck in your own head, to live in the little worlds you create. To forget that there are people out there reading your work, people who may be deeply affected by what you do, that you are writing not just for yourself, but for them.

There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.

I started out as a writer and a director. I started acting because I wanted to know how to relate to the actors. When people ask me what I do, I don't really say that I'm an actor, because actors often wait for someone to give them roles.

You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor.

I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

As a writer, the best mindset is to be unafraid.

I want an ending that's satisfying. I'm more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don't like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better.

With the first novel, I was concerned I would be pigeon-holed as an Asian-American writer, and the book would be labeled for Asian-Americans only.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.

Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.