A good writer always works at the impossible.

A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.

— John Steinbeck

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

— Peter Matthiessen

...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering…

— Marcel Proust

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

— Willa Cather

A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes…

— Rosamond Lehmann

“What a joke it is to read or hear—as I have read or heard more times than I can count—that writers ‘see more clearly’…

— Gilbert Sorrentino

“I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I…

— Madeleine L'Engle

The writer works in a lonely way.

— Irwin Shaw

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don't know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes.…

— Barry Lopez

I don't feel like I'm a writer who works under any influence.

— Lisa Lutz

“The only good writer was a dead writer.”

— John Steinbeck

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative,…

— Jonathan Dee

You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your…

— Peter Abrahams

It is no secret that I have read 'The Da Vinci Code' several times. I genuinely believe that 'The Da Vinci Code' and 'Angels…

— Ashwin Sanghi