Quotes About Writers

Reviews are for readers, not writers. If I get a bad one, I shrug it off. If I get a good one, I don't believe it

There is more of a nation's politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic writers on public affairs and constitutions.

In the century that has just passed, many of the intellectual elite went mad. It was as if, with the death of God, everyone suddenly turned into a saviour who wanted either to annihilate the obsolete world order or to establish a utopia. Naturally, there were writers among those who went mad. The fact that they had knowledge did not exempt intellectuals: there is madness everywhere. When one loses control over one's self, the result is madness.

If literature is to transcend political interference and return to being a testimony of man and his existential predicament, it needs first to break away from ideology. To be without "isms," is to return to the individual and to return to viewing the world through the eyes of the writer, an individual who relies on his own perceptions and does not act as a spokesman for the people. The people already have rulers and election campaigners speaking in their name.

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.

Along with sharp criticism, America needed a class of writers that would embrace the country and give it "a national character, an identity" creating "a new moral American continent" without which the physical one was "a carcass, a bloat.

Then he would be relegated to the circle of shamed writers forever and without hope of appeal: James Frey, Stephen Glass, Clifford Irving, Greg Mortenson, Jerzy Kosinski Ã¢â'¬Â¦

It was a writers' curse, this verbal embroidery. Never seeing anything as it was, always analyzing and reformulating it. Maybe the entire habit of observation, the thing he trained himself in, was just a nervous tic, a compulsion.

I'm grateful to the following writers, whose work you should read if you want to learn more about Mexico and the realities of compulsory migration: Luis Alberto Urrea, Óscar Martínez, Sonia Nazario, Jennifer Clement, Aída Silva Hernández, Rafael Alarcón, Valeria Luiselli, and Reyna Grande.

I'm sympathetic with new writers who focus so much on the beginning. That's what you show friends or beta readers to see if you are just wasting your time or if there's something there. But you won't really know until you finish the whole book.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.

He [Kafka] did not have for his private and interior processes that disregard which distinguishes insignificant writers from writers of imagination. A person who thinks that he is empowered to separate his inner world from the outer one has no inner world from which something might be separable.

But what we need are readers. Right? Where would writers be without readers? Who are they going to write for? And actors, what are they without an audience? Actors, painters, dancers, comedians, even just ordinary people doing ordinary things, what are they without an audience of some sort? "See, that's what I do. I am the audience. I am the witness. I am the great appreciator

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

I simply try to act as an honest broker for greater persons and writers than I am ... I present no theory, nor do I have one ... I have constructed no Schema ... in terms of the struggle between Eros and agape and the futility of the former in the face of the latter. I have no aspirations, hoping only to show you what some great writers thought these things are.

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

Where writers are from is one of the world' s most boring topics. Where we're born, gender or race, wealth or poverty - those are the things we spend time talking about. Stop trying to label me. I'm a writer. Worry about whether I'm any good!

I'm transitioning to television and film, but ultimately, I want to have a stronger presence on the web and be able to curate the content that I want to see. To bring attention to other filmmakers and writers.

The road that led me to literature was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.

The deaf community is nearly never portrayed accurately on television/film because most writers never took the time to immerse themselves in the deaf culture before portraying it on television. They also never got to know their deaf actors.

It's true, some senior Hungarian writers are not known for their laughter. There is a strong Germanic influence - an attitude that if it's enjoyable it can't possibly be literature.