Quotes About Writers

We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.

Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.

We writers can use our own longing - and frequently do - without ever having to understand or analyze it. That is why our stories are often wiser than we are.

Browning calls the poet God's spy and that's a complimentary way of putting it. We could say, more neutrally, that writers are almost always spies and have the kinds of lives that spying creates. They are constantly collecting information, making mental notes.

Because writing teaches writers to write, this

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

I adore the company of other writers because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course, we get each other in a unique way.

I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.

The funny thing in France is that writers are not allowed to retire, because the French government say you are still earning money from books you wrote 20 years ago.

I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers.

I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Friendship is a very simple word, very commonly used. The word friend is almost used on a daily basis. Yet, the depth and meaning of friendship certainly go beyond the simple and the common. Throughout history friendship has been a favorite theme for many writers. The following passages highlight what others have said about friendship in the past.

beneath the surface, Emily was trying to understand if writers were responsible for the feelings they prompted in others: if hurling a word had the same effect as throwing a stone. Was imagination—like a loaded gun—the one pulling the trigger?

It's interesting when you're doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there.... My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they've been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.

Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Codependent writers attempt to help people shift their focus and effort from other people to self. This merely exchanges one form of idolatry for another because whoever or whatever is the unbiblical focus of one's life is that person's idol.

For hardly any of the ecclesiastical writers have handled the Divine Scriptures more ineptly and absurdly than Origen and Jerome.

The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.

This historical scepticism is healthy. But it misses the bigger point: that whatever the view of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

whatever the views of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

Roman writers tended to take it for granted that the origins of the senate went back to Romulus, as a council of 'old men' (senes), and that by the fifth century BCE it was already a fully fledged institution operating much as it did in 63 BCE.

Roman writers tended to take it for granted that the origins of the senate went back to Romulus, as a council of 'old men' (senes)

I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.