Quotes on Writer

I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.'

No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.

You need to keep something for yourself. As a writer, I feel that even more strongly. I feel like I need to be able to freely observe the world. That's the way I like to move through the world; I don't need to be the focus of attention. If I am, it impairs my ability to write and to do what I do.

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.

A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought - the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.