Quotes on Writers

The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life.

There's no such thing as a writer's block. If you're having trouble writing, well, pick up the pen and write. No matter what, keep that hand moving. Writing is really a physical activity.

Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

I don't deal with writer's block, I don't allow myself to believe that there is such a thing. I think that there are good days and a lot more less good days.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.

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.'

It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

I love producing, writing. I rarely write with other writers unless I have a real great respect for them. Like Burt Bacharach, or Carole Sager, or Stevie Wonder. Somebody like Smokey - like that. Otherwise, I choose to write alone.