A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal." -The Carrie Diaries pg. 337”
“A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.”
“A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.”
“A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.”
“A writer must know how people read, what are the main sources of reading errors, and what can be done to possibly forestall them.”
“A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.”
“A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.”
“A writer must say yes to life.”
Source: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
“A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad.”
“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.”
“A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spell from her pen.”
Source: Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively
“A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.”
“A writer needs a partner who can act as fuel to his artistic mind, yet has the great ability to sober him up and help him be in sync with the non-artistic part of his soul.”
“A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.”
“A writer needs certain conditions in which to work and create art. She needs a piece of time; a peace of mind; a quiet place; and a private life.”
“A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.” “That’s only three.” Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.”
Source: Beautiful Ruins
“A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.”
“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination.
With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture.
The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow.
A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.”
“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
“A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don't have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren't going to finish a book.”
“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”
“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”
“A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.”
Source: The gaze of Orpheus, and other literary essays
“A writer observes. A writer records for posterity. The moments in the transience of the labyrinth of time that would go unrecorded otherwise! A writer records for value. A writer records for sentimentalism. A writer tries in earnest to carry the emotions and sentiments that make us what we ultimately are. For what are we? Empty spaces in an atom!”
“A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.”
“A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.”
Source: Boy: Tales of Childhood
“A writer of stories is a liar.”
“A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“A writer often wants to change a reader’s perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader.”
“A writer once asked what I'd say if I ever met my biggest hater. I paused, thought deeply and said, "Probably 'suk a dog dik, motherfuker.'"”
“A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love.”
Source: Eleven Minutes
“A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin.”
“A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.”
“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
“A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.”
“A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.
But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.
Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”
And I say to them, “Fuck you!”
One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.
When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.”
“A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]”
Source: Little Failure: A Memoir
“A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.”
“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.”
“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.”
Source: Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
“A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.”
Source: Bird by Bird
“A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.”
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.”
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.”
Source: Pearls Of Eternity
“A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.”
“A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.”
Source: In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
“A writer’s amulets include explication, free association, parallelism, antithesis, and epiphany to create a silhouette of that which heretofore did not exist and now speaks with an autonomous, ghostly reverberation.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“A writer’s breakthrough is a breakdown with a smile.”