I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.
Jim Jarmusch

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
William Golding

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.
Kurt Loder

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
Annie Dillard

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Leo Rosten

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.
Jeanette Winterson

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
Jeanette Winterson

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.
Jim Bishop

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
Jim Bishop

I'm a writer first and a woman after.
Katherine Mansfield

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Eudora Welty

I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
Eudora Welty

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Joseph Joubert

I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.
Clarence Thomas

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
Franklin P. Jones

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Leo Rosten

The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
Leo Rosten

I think with every writer there are two people there.
Hugh Leonard