Quotes About Writers

I do have two wonderful awards from the Western Writers of America, one for 'Beardance' and the other for 'Far North.' The award is called the Spur, and the plaques really do have spurs on them!

I have nothing wrong with comics and writers poking fun at the President, as long as it's funny. When it's the same retread jokes with predictable punchlines, that's when it's offensive.

Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!

Despite the ever-increasing financial pressures experienced by writers and the ever-decreasing space afforded by the media to books, writers are still willing to aim for quality and to take risks.

Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.

Writers who do crap work believe they have turned in spun gold and all their little darlings must be defended.

I've taken a lot of crap. That's just the way life is. There are going to be writers who like you and writers who despise you.

I find that dialogue is bad in most scripts. I just think there are very few writers that can capture the natural way people talk.

The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.

I was a Marvel kid, and I would have to say that Spiderman is my all-time favorite character. As I got older, my tastes developed a little bit more, and I would follow certain writers; like, I really got into Grant Morrison. From the time I was 5, I was into comic books. From the time I learned how to read, it was all about comic books.

The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school.

Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

And then for English verses, he said, they could not be certain of lasting applause, the changes of our language being so great and sudden, that the rarest poems within few years will pass for obsolete; and therefore he used to liken the writers in English verse to ladies, that have their pictures drawn with the clothes now worn, which, though at present never so rich, and never so much in fashion, within a few years hence will make them look like anticks.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured...the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked to him with a stick. If you disturb the patient at such time, he may break into tears or become violent.

I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial," said Anne, rather scornfully. "Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted toward each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.

by far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of "respectable" writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others

I was new and didn't realize that brand new writers are treated like light bulbs; when one burns out, you can always buy more, screw the next one in, and it lights up just as bright. No, I am not being too harsh about how publishing treats new writers. If anything I'm toning it down. Sorry, for all you aspiring authors out there, but truth is truth, it is a hard business. Shine up the armor around your ego, harden your heart, keep your head down, and write.

I suppose writers are cruel people. The dead do not care. It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.

It would be great if teenagers could make movies. It's sad how some writers think they can write about stuff they don't understand.