(848 quotes found)
“Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.”
William Faulkner
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.”
John Dos Passos
“The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.”
Cyril Connolly
“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
Marcel Proust
“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
T.S. Eliot
“Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.”
Salman Rushdie
“The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.”
Ernest Hemingway
“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”
Susan Sontag
“The 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 Arthur Baldwin
