I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character's sexuality is fascinating. It's a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it's such a personal thing.
Alan Ball
All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
Alan Lightman
I was painfully shy, and I had tremendous difficulty making friends. So, lacking friends, I watched other people. Watching is something all writers must do, and it was in junior high that I learned to do it.
Alex Flinn
I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.
Amy Bloom
Don't all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way or that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks far deeper than their style, or their voice or other telltale antics?
Andre Aciman
A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.
Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.
Andrew Shaffer
Just for me - obviously, not all writers think this - but for me, I feel like seeing my book in Target and Barnes & Noble is pretty successful.
Anna Todd
I really want to have a possibility of going into the Hall of Fame one day. I think that's huge with a lot of baseball writers and old school guys. Of course, that's not the main goal - the main goal is winning a World Series. Hall of Fame is so far away. It's just something I've always thought about doing. I want to be as clean as I can.
Bryce Harper
All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.
Caroline Leavitt
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Chad Harbach
All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.
Christopher Koch
All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.
Claire Tomalin
All writers have their own pet commandments.
Darin Strauss
I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.
David Mitchell
If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read 'The Midnight Disease' by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain. I know what's wrong with me!
Dorothea Benton Frank
Writers - all writers, even screenwriters - like to make their mark. I don't think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers.
Elmore Leonard
All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.
Ernest Gaines
All writers want to know that someone is reading their work, taking them seriously. It provides a kind of moral support.
Felice Picano
You write five different things, and none of them work, and then suddenly something does, and you ask yourself, 'Why did that last one work?' I think that's the way the artistic mind works. All writers and artists of all kinds often don't know why things work.
Gilbert Morris
I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
All writers have the idea that they are famous.
All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.
All writers are vampires.
You know, all writers are vampires and they'll look around and they watch you when you're not even thinking they're watching you and they'll slip stuff in.
Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.
Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.
All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.
All writers of the Chaldaean period associate monotheism in the closest way with unity of worship.
I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'
All writers are battling and fighting as to how a woman should be characterised.
Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.
All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.
All writers have a love-hate relationship with writing. Performing is fun, too, but I wouldn't say it's my favorite. But the most fulfilling is producing.
We're all in this together - when one writer succeeds, all writers succeed. I love discovering new authors. I think we need to take care of each other and talk about craft and nurture talent.
All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.
All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that's why you become a writer.
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
All writers, in all viewpoints, must choose which information and scenes will be presented, and in which order. In that sense, the author is always represented as a point of view in a work of fiction. His hand can always be detected by the discerning.
It's like when you get sick of your own cooking: I occasionally wish I could write something that didn't come out sounding like me. All writers must experience that.
All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.
I have often said that I think children's books are like poetry. Finding the exact right words to tell a story is something all writers, regardless of genre, are challenged to do, but it is in children's that the art of selection really becomes an art.
I think all writers are different. I've been with a few writers; they're all different.
I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
