2,612 Quotes About Writers

If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Writers are writing in every corner of the globe.Writers are writing, moreover, in rich countries and poor countries alike.

The job of a writer is not to convey emotion but to invoke it.

J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."("I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.")[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]

Persistence can look a lot like stupid.