The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
Flannery O'Connor

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
Flannery O'Connor

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
Flannery O'Connor

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike

I am a writer of fragments.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
Jimmy Buffett

You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
Jimmy Buffett

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Mel Brooks

If you wish to be a writer, write.
Epictetus

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner