Writers' Mindset Quotes

When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.

We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.

It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

Remember that your job as a practicing writer is to remember it's never going to be perfect on your first pass.

That's the great thing about being a writer. You dream up amazing questions... and then dream up even more amazing answers.

...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.

When I began writing, the words that inspired me were these: A writer is someone who has written today. If you want to be a writer, whats stopping you?

I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn't just stand around with your hammer in your hand.

Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word.

I'm never really conscious of what I'm being influenced by when I'm writing.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.

I'm not fundamentally a writer. I know writers, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for them. It bothers me that no matter how well I do it, it's not really my format.

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.

I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.

I'm one of those writers who say, 'I've enjoy having written.'