A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A writer who doesn't care about the dissemination of his work is like a cook who doesn't care what restaurant he works in.”
“A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.”
“A writer who has perfect writing skills and zero honesty is not an author but a sales person.”
“A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino's, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.”
Source: Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates
“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”
Source: Trouble Is My Business: A Novel
“A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.”
“A writer who isn't writing isn't really alive.”
“A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.”
Source: The beauties of Johnson: choice selections from his works
“A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.”
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
Source: Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.”
Source: In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers
“A writer who wants to be translated and published abroad faces a very difficult challenge: first of all, he must make sure that his book is cosmopolitan in the best sense of the word, that it is interesting to a global audience. Nobody is going to read about problems that they don’t care about.”
“A writer, who was a celebrity in Paris, had entered her shop one day. He was not looking for a hat. He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark. He could swear that when he took her to the theatre and she sat back in the dark loges in her evening dress, her skin was as luminous as the finest of sea shells, with a pale pink glow to it. And he wanted these flowers for her to wear in her hair.”
Source: Delta of Venus
“A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.”
“A writer who won’t take moral responsibility may be a good writer, but he’s a shitty human being in my book.
- (Salem's lot deleted scenes)”
Source: 'Salem's Lot
“A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.”
“A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”
Source: The gaze of Orpheus, and other literary essays
“A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.”
“A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.”
Source: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
“A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.”
“A writer with her work needs to be like a dog with a bone all the time. She needs to know where she's hidden it. Where she's stored the good stuff. She needs to keep gnawing at it, even after all the meat seems to be gone. When a student of mine says (okay, whines) that she's impatient, or tired, or the worst: isn't it good enough? this may be harsh, but she loses just a little bit of my respect. Because there is no room for impatience, or exhaustion, or self-satisfaction, or laziness. All of these really mean, simply, that the inner censor has won the day.”
“A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.”
“A writer without confidence is like a metaphor without something to compare itself to.”
“A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.”
“A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes up to the surface at a given moment. A period of gestation is certainly needed, what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquility.’ You cannot write about an experience when you are living it, suffering it. You are too busy surviving to look at it objectively. At least I can’t.”
“A writer works himself up to a pitch of ecstasy, otherwise he does not take up his pen. But ecstasy is not so easily distinguished from other kinds of excitement. And as a writer is always in haste to write, he has rarely the patience to wait, but at the first promptings of animation begins to pour himself forth. So in the name of ecstasy we are offered such quantities of banal, by no means ecstatic effusions. Particularly easy it is to confound with ecstasy that very common sort of spring-time liveliness which in our language is well-named calf-rapture. And calf-rapture is much more acceptable to the public than true inspiration or genuine transport. It is easier, more familiar.”
Source: All Things are Possible
“A writer writes a book. People read it. You don't know what they're reading, really. You read a review and think, "That is so inaccurate. You can't have been reading my book with any kind of attention, because that is all wrong, that's even the wrong name you're including there." But these reviewers have been diminished in importance, the work is so little respected. If you're reviewed by a real critic, by James Wood or Louis Menand, then you get something that is informed, interesting, and highly articulate. But the average review doesn't have that kind of depth anymore.”
“A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.”
Source: How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays
“A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader's great experience.”
“A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.”
“A writer writes to feed readers who can't live on bread alone.”
Source: Mommy, Can Girls Be President Of The White House?: Books For Kids, Children's Book, Picture Book, Preschool, Childrens books by age 3-5, Girls Ages 4-8 ... Gender Inequality In America Book 1)
“A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.”
Source: Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh: A Novel
“A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it?”
“A writer writes what other people only think.”
Source: How to Grow a Novel: The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Overcome Them
“A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.”
Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
“A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.”
Source: Life's Little Detours: 50 Lessons to Find and Hold onto Happiness
“A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.”
“A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.”
“A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.”
Source: Education of a Wandering Man
“A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.”
Source: The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965
“A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.”
“a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.”
Source: Parthian Words
“A writer's heart must beat. A reader's heart must hear it.”
“A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.”
Source: The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way
“A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.”
“A writer's job is not complete without attention to precision. What you're trying to be precise about is your relationship to the observed thing. And "observed thing" could include remembered thing, fantasized thing, fictionalized thing, recorded thing, trans-altered thing. It's the model that's in front of you or in your brain or your memory or whatever. So you're trying to be precise about what it is you're seeing because it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to depict it as it is.”
“A writer's job is to cultivate what can go wrong. You're always looking for that dramatic arc of where things can fail.”
“A writer's job is to give the reader a larger vision of the world.”
“A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.”
Source: The world according to Garp