Writer Quotes

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.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself.

Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

Everyone to me has to pick a subject to talk about in music if you’re going to be a writer.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.

Writers who have neither product utopian trash.

For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories…The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that’s my function, but from time to time it’s possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.