A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A writer's circle is never empty, there are plenty of imaginary friends.”
“A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can.”
“A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...”
“A writer’s heart beats alone, but her reflection never fades." – Yvonne Padmos”
“A writer’s heart
does not only hold scars caused by love,
but also those that cross
the lines of unsaid words
and fully-lived, unspoken feelings.
Life is merely a tragedy to a writer,
something that must occur
like the final line of a book,
and like an ink stain that inevitably
taints the fingers of a poet.
Real love, too, must be attained
In the same way.”
“A writer's life is different from the life of a normal man's life. A writer cannot settle down at one place. He has to keep traveling and drifting from one place to another. Because his travels give meaning and substance to his stories and poetry, he must keep on traveling. The people he meets and the places he visits, give unique perspectives to him to think, reflect and write about.
A writer does not belong to one village, one city, one town, or one country. A writer belongs to the world.”
“A writer's mind is unhinged when he starts from “I write, what I see”, but ends up with “I see, what I write”
“A writer's role was never just to tell stories, but to create a world to encompass and share with others.”
“A writer’s silence is the loudest scream; it’s the unwritten chapters of their life that echo in the emptiness of their soul.”
Source: Shadows
“A writer's soul is what tethers the story to the reader. It is the voice that cries out from the characters. A raw, carnal emotion, often louder than the words passing our lips.”
“A writer's thoughts can act as an Aladdin's lamp, which can enlighten and open the mind of a reader, by showing opportunities and beauties of life.”
“A writer’s voice emanates from their interest and compulsions that absorbs them completely. Only by fully committing himself or herself to a pet subject or issue can the writer develop a thematic tone that speaks to other people with authority and serenity. The quality of their literary voice is the crucial part of the writer’s legitimacy, and their authenticity cannot come from mimicking other writers’ style, but must evolve naturally from their inner sanctity and must flow effusively from an inner necessity.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“A writer’s voice is the distinct fashion peculiar to a writer in which he pieces together words.”
Source: Learn Creative Writing: A guide to writing perfect drafts
“A Writer says: read what I have written An historian says: listen to my lecture A critic says: listen to what I think A journalist says: let me tell you a story.”
“A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does.
In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, “But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?”
“A writer should always bravely face life, risking death and mutilation in order to dethrone an emperor.”
Source: The Republic of Wine: A Novel
“A writer should always feel like he's in over his head”
“A writer should always have some profession which brings him into close contact with the reality's of life.”
“A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.”
“A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.”
“A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.”
“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.”
“A writer should feel deeply from his heart of the joys and sorrows of people. And he must write as honestly as possible. Then only can he claim to be a writer.”
“A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.”
Source: Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks
“A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.”
Source: The Common Reader
“A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.”
Source: Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
“A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.”
“A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.”
Source: The Art of Literature: Top of Schopenhauer
“A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.”
“A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.”
“A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.”
Source: How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight from His Own Letters and Work
“A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?”
“A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.”
Source: In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers
“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Source: Ernest Hemingway, Knut Hamsun [and] Hermann Hesse
“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”
Source: A primer for the gradual understanding of Gertrude Stein
“A writer shoves into her first novel more or less everything she has ever thought, seen, read, loved, hated, experienced.”
“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. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.”
“A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.”
Source: Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals
“A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.”
“A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.”
“A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.”
“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”
Source: Conversations with Don DeLillo
“A writer toils to combat the insufficiency plaguing his or her life. Every writer seeks to ward off the corrosive obliteration wrought by the passage of time upon memory by capturing on paper his or her present day thoughts on life. For these intrepid souls, writing not only entails a lifetime of work it also represents their very lifeblood spilled out onto sheets of virgin white paper. Writers’ inkblot of words forms a pictograph for present and future generations to view; their thoughtful elucidations speak to us from the grave. Writers’ words transcend time by creating indelible images that survive wars, famines, epidemics, and censorship. Thanks to great writers, every man, woman, or child can escape the confines of their own cloistered environment and converse with other people of every occupation and lifestyle whose communal heartbeats form the bloodstream of every city. Thanks to literary figures, each reader can peer into the depths of past generations whose eclectic filament forms the ever-evolving equitable eye in humankinds’ collective consciousness, or colloquially what we refer to as humanity.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.”
Source: Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
“A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.”
“A writer walks in nature to wonder.”
“A writer wastes nothing.”
“A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.”
Source: Essays and Reviews
“A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop.”