Quotes About Writers

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.

Terry liked fiction, so we had Joe Heller, Richard Price, Tom McGuane, Robert Stone, J. P. Donleavy, and Kurt Vonnegut writing for us. Terry was not a rock and roller; Terry liked hanging out at Elaine's.

There's simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers.

All writers are unaffiliated. The novelist, the poet, will understand the institutions they live within, including their religious traditions, as aggregate historically amended fictions. Appointing themselves as witnesses, they are necessarily independent of all institutions, including the institution of the family-which may be why nothing makes family members more nervous than the discovery that one of them is a writer.

Many people like books because they're suspenseful or scary or touching or inspirational or because one admires the characters as if they were real people. Maybe it's only writers who like the writing.

America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.

Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glistening depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity.

Good writers define reality Bad ones merely restate it.

There's no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material.

God impresses His writers to speak to our needs, to tell us of sin when we need a message of judgment, and to tell us of hope when our hearts are weary. The Old Testament stories are much more than simply stories. They are powerful sermons driven by the conviction that God is Master of the universe and Lord of our lives.

There's a reason that whenever fascists come to power, the writers are among the first to go to jail.

This group was composed almost entirely of high-performing urban professionals—doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, successful artists and writers, professors—who went to normal jobs by day but returned in the evening to a very different and highly secretive world built around fellowship, polygamous sex, radical politics, and political theater.

Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

I watch 'Watchmen', and I wish I was in that writers room, so I could figure out what they're doing, story-breaking-wise. I've never seen a television show like that.

When I started, the music I would be drawn to would be heavy metal and new wave like Black Sabbath - things that seemed more shocking - and then, of course, eventually I would find bands and writers who were laying things out very clearly and whose words felt very sharp to the touch and sharp to your feelings.

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

I didn't want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can't just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.

Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.

Pittsburgh was the first chance to be in a classroom with other writers, to have conversations with other writers. In fact, after graduate school, I lived in Japan, Ohio and New Orleans, and only upon leaving Pittsburgh did I see what a special community it was for poets, so I was eager to come back. It's a strong arts community across the board.

I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

In the comedy world, there's always been one woman to five men. I think that's changing, that we're being respected more as writers and comedians.

The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.