I recently heard a great writer say that an essential…

Every writer is an outsider.

— Andrew Sean Greer

I think it's true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling stories about…

— Elif Batuman

“A lifetime's experience urges me to utter a warning cry: do anything else, take someone's golden retriever for a walk, run away with a…

— J. G. Ballard

If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in…

— John Gardner

“Harriet pushed her hair back and looked at him seriously. 'Sport, what are you going to be when you grow up?' 'You know what.…

— Louise Fitzhugh

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...]…

— Anonymous

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate…

— James Thurber

The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked -…

— Glenn Greenwald

“The truth was much simpler. When do you become a writer? “When you say you are,” he said. I”

— Jeff Goins

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it…

— Alice Mattison

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's…

— Mohsin Hamid

A writer must say yes to life.

— Natalie Goldberg

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the…

— Uma Thurman

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the…

— Anais Nin