Writer Quotes

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? 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.

I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.

I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.

For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don’t think you’re very good at it – which is rubbish. You’re missing out here.

If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.

That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death.

I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. … A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias…it is the Self escaping into the open.