A writer is a person who produces nonfictional writing or literary art such as novels, short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, or essays—especially someone who writes professionally.
Skilled writers are able to use language to express ideas and images. A writer's work may contribute significantly to the cultural content of a society.
The term writer is customarily used as a synonym of author, although the latter term has a somewhat broader meaning.
Famous quotes containing the word writer:
“No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“I’m a writer first and a woman after.”
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)