2,612 Quotes About Writers

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

We are the thoughts we choose to keep.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

When writers and psychologists believe they've illuminated reality, they are referring to something else: they transform the dark reality into a bright reality and then it's no longer reality with its real color, quality, and condition--instead they set forth a reality of their own heads that has nothing to do with the events spontaneously occurring in the spirit.

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

Seriously, what is the source of our thoughts? How do artists create art? How do writers write? What is it that is doing the creating?

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]