American writer Quote by Robertson Davies

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story…

— Harlan Ellison

Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.

— Giles Foden

Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.

— Nick Hornby

“Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. In my…

— Don DeLillo

My feeling is that I think writers in general tend to be self-conscious and it takes a bit of a leap of faith or…

— Conor Oberst

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot…

— Jamaica Kincaid

“What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. (...) Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn't…

— Haruki Murakami

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're…

— Edward Hirsch

Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with…

— Katie Kitamura

You know how sometimes you meet writers that are so full of themselves? They feel really proud that they wrote something . But what…

— Sandra Cisneros

“As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing…

— Nicholas Carr

“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,”

— Steven Pinker