A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A writer draws a road map where readers walks with their love, joy, anger, tears, and dismay. Every story, every poem, has different meanings for every reader.”
“A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.”
“A writer evolves with her thoughts. In this process, the story sometimes becomes the writer, and sometimes the writer is the story.”
Source: Bra Strap: Stories hidden beneath the strings
“A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.”
“A writer finds peace in silence, speaking only to the page, yet the words survive only by stepping into the noise of the world to be seen, heard, and held by others.”
“A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”
Source: The Bone Clocks
“A writer from ESPN magazine once described me as the world's largest eleven-year-old. That's true. I ride my Sea-Doo jet ski, play putt-putt golf, go to water parks, and act silly. On the bottom floor of my house in Beverly Hills, I have video games, a pool table, a Pepsi machine, and all the things they have in arcades. I drive go-karts, at least the ones I can fit in. I karate-chop my friends when they come over, like the Kato dude in the Pink Panther movies.”
“A writer gets to live yet another life every time he or she creates a new story.”
Source: On Writing Wonderfully: The Craft of Creative Fiction Writing
“A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off--even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied to me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and I would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it anymore and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.”
Source: On Democracy
“A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don't; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all.”
“A writer has many tools: eyes, ears, nose, sensations, thoughts feelings and imagination. The tools can construct a house of stories.”
“A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.”
Source: Conversations with Philip Roth
“A writer has to have some kind of compulsive drive to do his work. If you don't have it, you'd better find another kind of work, because it's the only compulsion that will drive you through the psychological nightmares of writing.”
“A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.”
“A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.”
Source: Conversations with Bernard Malamud
“A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.”
“A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.”
“A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!”
“A writer helps to show you things you knew but didn't know you knew.”
“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."
[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]”
“A Writer in Love.
I was just a word weaver
What did I know of love?
Only that
Some days when the words weren’t enough,
I knew
I was in love.”
Source: Stardust and Sheets
“A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.”
Source: Other Colors
“A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.”
“A writer is a dangerous friend. Everything you say, all of your life and experience, is fodder for our writing. We mean you no harm, but what you know and what you’ve done is unavoidably fascinating to us. Being friends with a writer is a bit like trying to keep a bear as a pet. They’re wonderful, friendly creatures, but they play rough and they don’t know their own strength or remember that they have claws. Choose the stories you tell to your writer friends carefully.”
“a writer is a foreign country”
Source: Practicalities
“A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.”
“A writer is a kind of benevolent cannibal who eats the world.”
“A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.”
“A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo.'”
“A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.”
“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they strengthen their souls.”
“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”
“A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.”
Source: Early novels and stories
“A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.”
“A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.”
Source: Davita's Harp
“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”
“A writer is always observant, of course... You can take the kernel of something - part of it - and use it in a book.”
“A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.”
“A writer is always working.”
“A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.”
“A writer is an overflowing reader.”
“A writer is anyone who follows only the truth of who they are, without ever relying on anything other than the poverty and solitude of that truth. In this respect, children and women in love are born writers.”
“A writer is basically someone who shares his or her value or vision of the world.”
“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”
“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.”
“A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?”
“A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.”
“A writer is first and foremost a witness of her time. She must tell the truth, not take a political position. But then the truth that she discovers is profoundly political.”
“A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.”
Source: Force of circumstance