"A writer is..."

I love when writers talk about what writers are.  Here are a few descriptions I've
come across recently...

A writer is a world trapped in a person.  - Victor Hugo

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
- Joy Williams

By Kevin Lucbert

on writing - a writer is...

A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any
feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of
wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes.
- William Sansom

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
- Robert Penn Warren

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
- Marcel Proust

on writing - gore vidal

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns
nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he
takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is
done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

- Gore Vidal

By Kelsey Beckett