There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.
Writer's a lovers quarrel - encounters breathe the quill...
Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.
More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.
Basically, writers write because they have something to say...Everyone has a story in them, writers merely decide to share it with the world...
Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.
If he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process...
Flora was in that state where the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak and wishes to go on holiday - and where the flesh in most cases wins hands down with a packed suitcase. It did so now. So...
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two p...
Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
I have voices in my headI'm a slave to imaginary peopleI feel what they feelI experience what they experience I live in their world And I'm devoted to translating their storiesI'm not crazy, I'm a wri...
He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".
If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
Why do I do it to myself? Why don't I get an ordinary job?
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
A writer's work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.
Over the years I've come to realize that in a broad sense I'm interested in power and politics. I'm interested in how individuals try to eke out some wiggle room within these large institutions . . ....
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.