I like being a writer.
Terry PratchettWe like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
Stephen KingStand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting. But you can go from acting to being a TV personality to being a radio personality to being a writer to being a producer, to just being a visionary, to voiceover work.
Kevin HartSometimes I wonder why I’m a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I’m a successful writer.
Haruki MurakamiI am not a consecutive writer.
Dr. SeussDickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
Terry PratchettI’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.
Lana Del ReySome people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.
Alice Walker‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.
Alice MunroThe writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
James BaldwinI began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.
Haruki MurakamiThere are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Ernest HemingwaySiren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.
Terry PratchettAs a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.
Frank OceanA good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Friedrich NietzscheThe responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
James BaldwinThe writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Karl MarxMost people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.
Haruki MurakamiI always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.
Winston ChurchillI don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.
Haruki MurakamiI knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
Paul AusterEvery secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia WoolfI’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.
Haruki MurakamiI’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.
J. K. RowlingI feel like I’m a New Yorker because I really know the city. I actually tell the drivers where to go – I have this bad habit, I always question the drivers. I do that all the time because I feel like I know the best way, when really it’s like, ‚Yo, man, shut up. This dude does this every day of his life.‘
J. ColeAlthough I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.
George LucasYou have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.
Haruki MurakamiI had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.
Haruki MurakamiI’m a writer first and a singer second.
Lana Del ReyJack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
Hunter S. ThompsonI was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.
Paulo CoelhoStyle is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.
Robert FrostThe book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘
Paul AusterIf I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.
David BowieAnd as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.
Stephen KingAs far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.
Terry PratchettI’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.
Anthony BourdainI don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.
Paul AusterI wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.
Douglas AdamsBecoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
Paul AusterFor a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
Ernest HemingwayI was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.
Alice WalkerMy favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.
J. K. RowlingWho is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Kurt VonnegutIn college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.
Anthony BourdainI’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.
Dolly PartonI’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.
Paulo CoelhoI realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.
David BowieEvery writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki MurakamiI am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
Robert FrostAll the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.
Christopher HitchensIt was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.
Robert GreeneI don’t go around thinking I’m Ray Bradbury all the time.
Ray BradburyI’m a writer first and a singer second. And then I started editing my own videos when I was 17, so it’s a process I’ve been doing since I was younger.
Lana Del ReyWe are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Henry David ThoreauThe writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.
Hunter S. ThompsonIn Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
Ray BradburyFor a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.
George OrwellI’m a writer. I don’t support any war. That’s my principle.
Haruki MurakamiGenerally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
Charles Bukowski