Quotes About Writers

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

We are surrounded by symbols and take them for granted. They had to start somewhere, though, and gained their meaning because of historical use, which is suggestive for fiction writers. Anything can be turned into a symbol.

the sheen of novelty had worn off. Sometimes it seemed to the performers and writers that the only comment they heard was how Saturday Night had gone downhill—indeed, that it had been going downhill since about the fourth week it was on. The higher the ratings got, the more disdainful the criticism became. Anne Beatts grew fond of saying that you can only be avant-garde so long before you become garde.

Besides, back to the subject of you being nuts, all writers are nuts, didn't you know that?

Books come in all shapes and sizes – as do writers – and sometimes those books you think you are going to love, you don't, while sometimes books you think are not worth picking up turn out to be some of the best you have ever read.

Lots of writers are fascinated by evil and write copiously about it, but they are bored by virtue; this not only limits their scope but prevents a satisfactory account of evil, which can no more be comprehended apart from good than light can be comprehended apart from darkness.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

The writers I respect the most had an undying commitment to a vision.

It's lovely when writers I like like each other.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

I think it no accident that the myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers' less good work as their best work.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking what a fire hydrant feels about dogs.

unpacked her books, her sweet delight in happier days, and her soothing resource in the hours of moderate sorrow: but there were hours when even these failed of their effect; when the genius, the taste, the enthusiasm of the sublimest writers were felt no longer.

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

Ten years before Stalin's Great Terror and six years before Hitler came to power, Benda already feared that the writers, journalists, and essayists who had morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence. And so it came to pass.

Ten years before Stalin's Great Terror and six years before Hitler came to power, Benda already feared that the writers, journalists, and essayists who had morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence. And so it came to pass. If

If it happens, the fall of liberal democracy in our own time will not look as it did in the 1920s or 1930s. But it will still require a new elite, a new generation of clercs, to bring it about. The collapse of an idea of the West, or of what is sometimes called "the Western liberal order," will need thinkers, intellectuals, journalists, bloggers, writers, and artists to undermine our current values, and then to imagine the new system to come.

Human females, they're kind of crazy during this time aren't they? If you chose to believe the stories written by male writers. They heard a bang and thump from the kitchen. Followed by Meg yelling at something. That many males can't be wrong.

Human females. They're kind of crazy during this time, aren't they?" "If you choose to believe the stories written by male writers," Vlad replied. They heard a bang and thump from the kitchen, followed by Meg yelling at something. Simon sighed. "That many males can't be wrong.

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.