If you appear in the ‚Atlantic‘ or ‚Harper’s‘ or the ‚New Yorker,‘ by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

I 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.

I am not a consecutive writer.

For a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

‚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.

I 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.

Most 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.

I’m a writer first and a singer second.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

As 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.

As 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.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

I’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.

Some critics will write ‚Maya Angelou is a natural writer‘ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

There 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.

My 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.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

All 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.

I 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.

Style 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.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

I’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.

Becoming 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.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

I 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.‘

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.

I don’t go around thinking I’m Ray Bradbury all the time.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

Stand-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.

Siren 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.

The 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.‘

I 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.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

For 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.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

It 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.

My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

I’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.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

If you wish to be a writer, write.