Writer's Life Quotes

“The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it.”

— Bill Barich

“In general, though, one should never forget the role money plays in shaping the writer's life, and the life inevitably informs the work. My own position is that I always want to convince a publisher to give me adequate money for what I want to do. At the same time, what I want to do is to arrive at full expression in a way that seduces, that pleases people in a way they didn't expect to be pleased, or even want to be pleased.”

— Tim Parks

“Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life”

— Jerzy Kosiski

“The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.”

— Dani Shapiro

“For most writers, reading is also a very intense experience; they don't read so much as compete. The writer measure's himself against every text he encounters, imagining he could do it better or wishing he had thought of it first. The natural writer would almost always rather be reading, writing, or alone, except of course when he needs to come up for air (that is, for subject matter, food, sex, love, attention). He may be a selfish son of a bitch, he may seem to care more about his work than about the people in his life, he may be a social misfit, a freak, or a smooth operator, but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood. Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.”

— Betsy Lerner

“There are three certainties in a writer's life: death, taxes, and rejection letters.”

— T.L. Rese

“If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?”

— Lauren B. Davis

“A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!”

— Christie Silvers

“All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash)”

— Larry Brown

“The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer's life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.”

— Sol Luckman

“What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

“A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.”

— Ronald Frame

“The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.”

— Mary Roberts Rinehart

“'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.”

— Mark Leyner

“I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer's life. On the other hand, it's good to have another job. It gives you something to do.”

— Tom Paulin

“Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. -”

— Stephen King

“An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.”

— Nick Harkaway

“How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'”

— Dani Shapiro

“Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it's easier than ever to document private experiences and divulge the most intimate secrets.”

— Joanna Scott

“All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel ... Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.”

— Diane Setterfield

“Readers," continued Miss Winter, "are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.”

— Diane Setterfield

“[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.”

— Roland Barthes

“What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.”

— Susan Sontag

“To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative
this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious-unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer's life can be distressing-negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers-disappointment with one's own work, on a daily/hourly basis!-it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.”

— Paul Theroux

“A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.”

— Toni Morrison

“There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.”

— John Updike

“I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.”

— Joan Didion

“I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.”

— Joan Didion

“An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.”

— Shannon L. Alder

“I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.”

— Kate Christensen

“Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience ... Moving ... compassionate.”

— Leigh Newman

“These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer's life than he or she cares to admit (a common error among those who anatomize fiction) but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself comes to seem much closer to an act of the imagination than ever before. My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth.”

— Julian Barnes

“Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.”

— James Norman Hall

“Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.”

— Gabrielle Roy

“My best experience as a writer was working with Michael Ondaatje. He let me dismantle his novel, reimagine it, and still had dinner with me and gave me good notes. But the best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life.”

— Anthony

“A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.”

— Mavis Gallant

“A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.”

— Harold Pinter

“I think that very often younger writers don't appreciate how much hard work is involved in writing. The part of writing that's magic is the thinnest rind on the world of creation. Most of a writer's life is just work. It happens to be a kind of work that the writer finds fulfilling in the same way that a watchmaker can happily spend countless hours fiddling over the tiny cogs and bits of wire ... I think the people who end up being writers are people who don't get bored doing that kind of tight focus in small areas.”

— Diane Ackerman

“I didn't intend to be writing - the writer's life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.”

— Sandra Cisneros

“A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen ... Except the act of writing.”

— E.L. Doctorow

“The worst time in any writer's life is the two months before publication. ALL writers become mental and pathetic, even those of devout faith, who have some psychological healing to lean up against, and gorgeous lives. All writers think that this time, the jig is up, and they will be exposed as frauds.”

— Anne Lamott

“The writer's life seethes within but not without.”

— Anthony Burgess

“Nothing needs to happen to a writer's life after they are 20. By then they've experienced more than enough to last their creative life.”

— Flannery O'Connor

“There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life.”

— Pam Houston

“The writer's life is a life of revisions.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“A writer's life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.”

— Julian Barnes

“Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.”

— Kingsley Amis