Quotes About Writers

Some writers, rejecting the idea which science had reached, that reefs of rocks could be due in any way to "animalcules," have talked of electrical forces, the first and last appeal of ignorance.

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards - Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.

He admired writers whose own stories were as interesting as the ones they wrote.

Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And

romantic positivists"—who believed that with enough thought and therapy, love could be made into a less painful, indeed almost healthy, experience. This assortment of analysts, preachers, gurus, therapists, and writers, while acknowledging that love was full of problems, supposed that genuine problems must have equally genuine solutions.

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.

the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…

The longstanding neglect of the fascinating, pioneering group of women writers of the Romantic period is now a thing of the past . . . [but] our merely recognizing their existence does not mean that our work is done.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

The Victorian era produced more Victorian writers than any other period in history.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

Is the new generation of writers more concerned than their predecessors with politics, economics, and social class? I think that there are lowered expectations, not sthetic expectations for the work, but lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.

Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds.

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn't write a novel like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.

self-confidence is the worst of teachers—but from the church's most famous writers.

As we do so, it will be helpful to keep in mind that the biblical writers never seemed to be aware of the problem, except for one statement by Paul in Romans 9:19-21. And Paul's statement seems to raise

But [Ben Marcus] can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past--Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner--as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien régimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?