Writer Quotes

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.

I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.