Living Writers Quotes & Sayings

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world. — Laurie Foos

Most people think that making a living from books is fun or joyful, but there's much more to it than what the eyes can see, and I wish I had more time for more profitable and also joyful activities. — Robin Sacredfire

If all shy, soulful young women who dreamed of becoming writers for a living actually could do that, imagine the library we would have. — Sarah Elwell

This book is written for the professional writer who is making a living, but just barely. It is also for the aspiring writer who is looking for a niche. And for all the writers-in-between who would like to get paid well for writing. Entering the world of corporate communications is not selling out - it is an opportunity to sharpen your skills, practice your craft, and pay the rent, all at the same time! — Mary Moreno

At the conference I was asked whether all Yugoslav writers were now forced to live in exile. I answered that I was far more concerned about the people who were not writers who were forced into exile. Writers are familiar with the conditions of exile; exile is not foreign to writers, they often choose to live that way. Exile can be one's state of mind even while living in one's own homeland. I've chosen to live in many different countries over the years because I've always felt closer to mankind per se than to any nation in particular, even my own. Until recently it had seemed banal to say that every person is entitled to think and breathe under the same sky, but as our imperfect human race has difficulty recalling its own history, we're now obligated to state the obvious over and over again. — Nina Zivancevic

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound. — Willa Cather

He loved his job, which allowed time to do it without comparing his performance to others'. He loved the economics of death: hastening a person's passage into the afterlife not only provided him with a good living: it gave work to coroners, beat cops, detectives, crime scene technicians, the people who made fingerprint powder and luminal and other sundry chemicals and devices - not to mention firearm, ammunition, coffin, and tissue manufacturers - obituary writers, crime reporters, novelists. — Robert Liparulo

Writers are completely out of touch with reality. Writers are a crazy person. We create conflict - for a living. We do this all the time, sometimes on a weekly basis; we create horrible, incredible circumstances and then figure a way out of them. That's what we do. — Joss Whedon

It's worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature's loss as the republic's gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of. — Sarah Vowell

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. — Nicholson Baker

In living literature no person is a competent judge but of works written in his own language . I have expressed my opinion concerning a number of English writers; it is very possible that I may be mistaken, that my admiration and my censure may be equally misplaced, and that my conclusions may appear impertinent and ridiculous on the other side of the Channel. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

But the reason that writers like Harlan and Lee don't outline is that they enjoy the serendipity, the surprises that arise when they're not constricted by the steel girdle of an outline. And I get that too. Some of the best plot twists in my work have been ones that I didn't plan on, including the ending to PARANOIA. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is living in the story so that you "experience" it the way your characters do. — Joseph Finder

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why. — Jack Kerouac

I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country. — Daniel Alarcon

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.' — Amelie Nothomb

Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales. — John Perry Barlow

You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today. — Nelson Algren

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work. — Chad Harbach

It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all. — Molly Antopol

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."
Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm. — Anais Nin

Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
A person's true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all. — Imre Kertesz

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German. — Stefan Zweig

The wonderful fortune of some writers deludes and leads to misery a great number of young people. It cannot be too often repeated that it is dangerous to enter upon a career of letters without some other means of living. An illustrious author has said in these times, Literature must not be leant on as upon a crutch; it is little more than a stick. — Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Cherish every relationship in your life. There are certain things in life that can't be fixed if broken! — Avijeet Das

I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life. — Marlon James

I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read. — Khaled Hosseini

Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words ... There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which reosund about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning ... That is not all: we are living in an age of mystifications. Some are fundamental ones which are due to the structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well. — Jean-Paul Sartre

It was a great challenge to reconstruct Gypsy Rose Lee life, and my interviews with her sister [June Havoc] proved invaluable. It's not often that writers have access to living primary source material; this was the only person who experienced life on the vaudeville circuit with Gypsy during the 1920s, and who saw her perform at Minsky's Burlesque in the 1930s. She knew things that no one else could ever possibly know. — Karen Abbott

It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living. — Robert E. Howard

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty. — Herbert Gold

I admire Tolkien greatly. His books had enormous influence on me. And the trope that he sort of established - the idea of the Dark Lord and his Evil Minions - in the hands of lesser writers over the years and decades has not served the genre well. It has been beaten to death. The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between an army of people dressed in white and an army of people dressed in black. When I look at the world, I see that most real living breathing human beings are grey. — George R R Martin

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. — Ernest Hemingway,

The conclusion to which I am ever more clearly coming is that the only hope of attaining a true system of economics is to fling aside,once and forever, the mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian school. Our English economists have been living in a fool's paradise. The truth is with the French school, and the sooner we recognize the fact, the better it will be for all the world, except perhaps the few writers who are far too committed to the old erroneous doctrines to allow for renunciation. — William Stanley Jevons

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about. — Sharon Delarose

Color me....BRILLIANT. — Coco J. Ginger

I wanted to earn a living wage and to see something nice about me in the 'New York Times.' I wanted my mother to be proud. I wanted all the things you want and also feel silly for wanting. I wanted readers to say they'd enjoyed something of mine - to see my photo in magazines where I'd seen photos of other writers. — David Lipsky

The Word we study has to be the Word we pray. My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers, but from sitting still in the presence of the living Word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word. Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of *knowing* Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited. — Brennan Manning

At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind's dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind's dungeons. — Avijeet Das

No one can sing well, play well, or write well, without living through moments of the deepest pain and anguish. Every real talent has known times of torturing depression when the heart in its agony has cried out to God: "Why hast Thou forsaken me? What have I done that I should suffer so?" And then, at the very darkest moment, suddenly, the veil is torn from their eyes! Truth, with her flaming torch, stands before them, and they understand that God sends them suffering to strengthen and ennoble their talent, that it may touch men's hearts and show to tired wanderers on earth glimpses of heaven. — Aimee Dostoyevsky

Statistically, I'd say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make big money, and although it's not an easy trade - particularly when you're at your galley oar five days a week - it's easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star. — Dick Cavett

He made writing look easy and critics hate that. They like evidence of a struggle, of creative agony, wringing the masterpiece out of one's guts. After all, most critics think of themselves as writers, or had attempted to become writers. This leads to the bizarre situation in which failed writers pass judgment on writers who actually write for a living. — Jessica Zafra

I was always observing. Even while talking, living, going through every motion, I was watching myself and the situation. That's a writer. Always observing. — Mary Ellen Hannibal

Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not. — Coco J. Ginger

I'm living the dream! I just want to tell actors and writers it's never too late, and it can happen when you least expect it. — Geneva Carr

Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked. — Kate Christensen

Life ... is a bit like reading. ... If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing? — Julian Barnes

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Well
there are two kinds of loneliness, aren't there? There's the loneliness of absolute solitude
the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. For many writers it's necessary. Others need a female staff of family servants to type their bloody books and keep the their egos afloat. Being alone for most of the day means that you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people. I think it's better so. But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure ... And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference. — Patricia Duncker

I had writers block for months afterwards because I was just so taken aback by all of the sounds I was hearing. It's almost like hearing the most beautiful music you've ever heard, so you're like, "What's the point of me making anything?" It was this living sonic organism so the idea of recording something just seemed like taking this living thing and mummifying it. — Taraka Larson

The Other Worlds which fairy tales explore open a way for writers and storytellers to speak in Other terms, especially when the native inhabitants of the imaginary places do not belong to an established living faith and therefore do not command belief or repudiation. The tongue can be very free when it is speaking outside the jurisdiction of religion. — Marina Warner

My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who've been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we're living in, I put my faith in those people. — Barry Lopez

Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen's nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

We're living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we're working with - the landscape of language - is very different than it was a few decades ago. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own? — Richard Yates

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction. — Anais Nin

It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say. — Sherwood Anderson

Whining writers are a hideous sight; we should really shut up, because we are lucky if we can cobble together a living from all of this. — Deborah Moggach

And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by. — Avijeet Das

Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much? — Hannah Harding

But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living. — Fay Godwin

Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room. — Anne Tyler

That's what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks' thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man's way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds' front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too. — Dan Simmons

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone. — Rebecca Solnit

I think a writer is not an ideal husband ... Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they're living with, or they get irritable with the people that they're living with when the people insist on being noticed. — Roy Blount Jr.

Writing isn't generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we're doing something that we genuinely love. There's no other reason to work this hard, except that love. — Melissa Scott

Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. — Chinua Achebe

It is striking how many spiritual writers react to the specificity of real prayer. It runs deeper than Greek Neoplatonism and the influence of Buddhist spirituality. Frankly, God makes us nervous when he gets too close. We don't want a physical dependence on him. It feels hokey, like we are controlling God. Deep down we just don't like grace. We don't want to risk our prayer not being answered. We prefer the safety of isolation to engaging the living God. To embrace the Father and thus prayer is to accept what one pastor called "the sting of particularity."4 Our dislike of asking is rooted in our desire for independence. — Paul E. Miller

Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make. — Norman Lear

Because all writers are human beings first and writers second, my guess is that any advice for living with a writer is about the same as advice for living with a plumber or a refrigerator salesperson. — Clyde Edgerton

There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, 'The world is awful.' Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: 'The world is awful.' That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What a masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said. — Philip K. Dick

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant. — Russell Banks

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living. — Janette Rallison

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books. — Paul Auster

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. — Lee Smith

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling. — Andrea A. Lunsford

(on teaching writing)
So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest. — Celine Kiernan

But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. — Joseph Conrad

A warm dead photograph is much livelier than a living cold reality! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can't pick up a page. All the words slide off. — William H Gass

You're ... writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read. — Raymond Carver

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it. — Dean Wesley Smith

The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so. — Alan Dean Foster

I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work. — Henry Rollins

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way. — Romesh Gunesekera

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most — Eudora Welty

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there. — Gertrude Stein

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts. — Virginia Woolf

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between. — Don DeLillo

Lately, I usually write at the desk in my living-room or bedroom. From time to time, our red and stripy cat named Foxy decides to be my companion, poking his curious caramel-colored nose to the screen, watching me typing, and making attempts to put his paws on the keyboard despite the fact that he knows he is not allowed to; he also loves to arrange "sunbathing sessions for himself, purring joyfully while lying with his belly up under the lamp placed to the left of my computer; and, of course, the cat can't wait for when I happen to have a snack, to beg for some treats that seem to him tastiest if eaten from a caring human's hand. — Sahara Sanders

It takes thirty-three days to write a book
only thirty-three days. remember, writers lie for a living. — Darynda Jones

I was living in a terrible time when people were being accused of being communists, and they attacked the movie industry, especially the writers. People couldn't work if they were on the blacklist. The studios banned them. It was the most onerous period in movie history. I don't think we have ever had a period so dark as that. — Kirk Douglas

But I will admit, that most of my life has been with the thought of the reaper pacing behind me. I know he's there. He's not freaking me out or anything, but he's reminding me to grab at life with joy. I get a lot of joy from my writing.

And I hope the other writers are too, because it's a great thing to create a world of your own making. We'll beat back the reaper just a little while longer and enjoy the ride in the meantime. — Jamie Freveletti

The stories told, the words, create their own reality. The details are important. Words create realities and decide destinies.

Unidentified writers, under four evangelical pseudonyms, wrote a book that made the world what it is today. Their words created the very reality in which we have been living for two thousand years; the words simply had to be worthy of faith. Had it not been for the detail about the baked fish he ate after going hungry after he died on the cross, and the finger stuck into the wound, the world would not be Christian and would not be awaiting resurrection. The word becomes the reality, a reality of which we ourselves are merely a part. — Mikhail Shishkin

All writers
all beings
are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force ... All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.. — Janet Frame

Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself. — Norman Mailer

Books had rescued me when i most needed saving... Books were smarter than me and words inspired me... to try something new, charge forward without a clear understanding of what would happen next, because "given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?"
In the end, Thoreau, Whitman, Hafiz, and a dozen other writers put me up to the task of seeing if I dared to "live a life worth living. — Dee Williams

How do I know you're not crazy?" she asks. "How do I know you're not the craziest dude I've ever met?"
"You'll have to test me out."
"You have my info," she says. "I'll think about it."
"Rain," I say. "That's not your real name."
"Does it matter?"
"Well, it makes me wonder what else isn't real."
"That's because you're a writer," she says. "That's because you make things up for a living."
"And?"
"And"
she shrugs
"I've noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that. — Bret Easton Ellis