May Quote by Don DeLillo

If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.

— Tom Wolfe

Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.

— Kate DiCamillo

“Writers, even unpublished writers, have a tendency not to notice what’s going on around them when they are the center of attention.”

— Gary Reilly

Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about.…

— Harry Crews

Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel…

— Lisa Unger

Everywhere I go, I find that writers are treated as if they are invisible, as if they don't matter.

— Harlan Ellison

They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All…

— Vivian Gornick

There are so many different things out there trying to hook our attention, we writers have to be very selective and make certain that…

— Sue Monk Kidd

Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.

— Wole Soyinka

Another thing all writers have in common is we're all observers. We pay attention to detail.

— Judy Blume

The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

— Madeleine L'Engle

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you…

— Julia Alvarez