Writer Quotes

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

I was raised in California, so this whole New York winter thing is completely new for me. I’ve already justified buying seven coats!

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.

The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.