Quotes About Writers

If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.

Getting a beginner publishing deal really helped me gain the skills. I just kept writing and writing. You just take everything out of life and turn it into an idea or a melody or a song and find the best writers you can to write with that fit you and know what you want to do.

'Band Played On' is a good one. Barbara Orbison, who was Roy's wife, was involved in publishing in Nashville because she oversaw Roy's publishing, and she had a company in Nashville. She had a whole bunch of writers assembled, and they got together every day and wrote, and they write for everybody in Nashville.

Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children's writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull.

And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!

During the 2016 campaign, editors and bookers at media outlets claimed they couldn't find any good writers or TV pundits to discuss the appeal of Trump. That was always a lie.

No creator in modern times is going to stick around with a concept for 20 years. There are simply too many alternatives that writers want to pursue.

If you look back throughout the history of Broadway, there's always been periods where writers and producers have delivered the kind of things that people want to see, while at the same time pushing the form along.

I don't have the desire to just keep every record and put it out. That's not what I do. I make records for people; that's why I just continue to be consistent, where a lot of the other top writers, they kind of fell off because they started focusing on their own careers as artists. That's not where my head is at.

It's so great to come in and do something where you know how strong the format of the show is and you're working with writers and directors who worked on the original show. It feels like you're going into a well-run ship already. Then it's just a matter of creating these new characters.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

Comedy writers have the most fragile egos.

Not all great writers may seem great to us, regardless of how often and how hard we try to see their virtues. I know, for example, that Trollope is considered to have been a brilliant novelist, but I've never quite understood what makes his fans so fervent. Still, our tastes change as we ourselves change and grow older, and perhaps in a few months or so Trollope will have become my new favorite writer.

Consequently, we sympathize. We identify. We care. In fact, most writers would like you to identify

The most widespread individuality of writers consists, after all, in the fact that each conceals his bad qualities in an entirely particular way.

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

J. G. Ballard is just an example of the writers I like. Philip K. Dick is obviously one of them. I'm a big fan of William Gibson as well. He started cyberpunk with 'Neuromancer.' I've come to know him a little bit over Twitter, of all places, and I was always a huge fan of his. It's very cool to know he even knows I exist.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay.

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

Country music tends to be so sentimental and homespun, it's easy to stumble into self-parody, but Haggard has brought a freshness to the themes that places him alongside Hank Williams and Willie Nelson as one of the greatest country music writers.

I've yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine, and we have a tendency to treat them like that.

When somebody wants to write an article attacking a scoring system or the influence of wine writers, who's right in the cross hairs? It's not Steve Tanzer, it's not Marvin Shanken, it's me. These other people, it's not like they don't have some influence, and I'm more than happy to share it.