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Quotes about Writers

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Cyril Connolly
6,028
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Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

John Updike
3,036
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The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. -Susan Sontag
354
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His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for a writer.

Anatole Broyard
351
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To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

Anatole Broyard
327
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language. -Joseph Brodsky
306
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When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters.

Philip Roth
299
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The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

Thomas W. Higginson
282
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If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers. -Irvin S. Cobb
280
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The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines.

George V. Higgins
275
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Sometimes I think [my writing] sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.

Gene Fowler
274
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. -W. H. Auden
264
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Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
262
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Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

Fannie Hurst
260
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The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature;  only then can he see clearly. -Julian Barnes
256
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I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

James A. Michener
254
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The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see -- every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Graham Greene
254
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If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space. -Joyce Carol Oates
241
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The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

James A. Michener
227
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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

Salman Rushdie
226
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When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you. -Brian Moore
226
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Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

William G. Golding
213
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A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard-by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.

Archibald Macleish
213
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. -Willa Sibert Cather
211
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Good authors, too, who once knew better words Now use only four-letter words Writing prose - Anything goes.

Cole Porter
207
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Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens.

Malcolm Cowley
188
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Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. 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. -Mel Brooks
187
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The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

Lawrence Clark Powell
186
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The original writer is not he who does not imitate others, but he who can be imitated by none.

François R. Chateaubriand
185
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M F K Fisher is the dowager queen of writers on browsing and slicing. -Philip Howard
184
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