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

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

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

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.

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

I’m a writer first and a singer second.

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

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.

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.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

I’m a writer. I don’t support any war. That’s my principle.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

‚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.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

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

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.

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

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If 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.

Sometimes 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.

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.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

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

If you wish to be a writer, write.

In 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.

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.

I’m not a playwright.

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

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.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

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.

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.

Every 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.

And 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.

You 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.

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

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

I 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.

The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

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

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

I like being a writer.

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.

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.