Quotes About Writers

Too wistful. Too poignant. These walk-around-town-books, these day-in-the-life stories. I know writers love them. But I think it's hard to feel bad for this Swift fellow of yours. I mean, he has the best life of anyone I know.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

But my subconscious mind--the part I've heard writers call the lizard brain--could and did: it told me to reach for Anne Lamott or Edith Wharton or Calvin Trillin instead. And if I've learned one thing in my decades on earth, it's this: Don't argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself.

What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn't be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?

A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos," Chekhov said—tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers "should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.

Insanity is always a reasonable diagnosis when you're dealing with writers and artists. Sometimes the only real difference between crazy people and artists is that artists write down what they imagine seeing. In the past few decades, hardly a week has gone by without a reader of my blog questioning my mental health. I understand that; I've read my writing too.

That said, Snark can be effective (and funny) when done well, and without clichés. One of the problems with Snark nowadays is that it's overused, and therefore writers in this category have difficulty standing out from the crowd. Mike Nelson (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame) has written some very funny essays and books in this style.

This preoccupation with the difficulty of getting a thought out of one head and into another is something the industrialists share with a substantial number of intellectuals and creative writers, more and more of whom seem inclined to regard communication, or the lack of it, as one of the greatest problems not just of industry but of humanity.

He was liberal in his determination to understand the Biblical writers historically He was orthodox in his belief that the Bible was "dictated" by the Spirit. He was "neo-orthodox" in making Christ who came to save sinners central to the whole Bible.

I am rather inclined, however, to agree with ancient writers, that in those passages[1]wherein it is stated that the angel of the Lord appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, Christ was that angel.

My only claim to distinction among writers is that I do not believe my life contains any materials for a novel. I have prowled around Limehouse and the gamiest sections of Paris, but I have never yet seen (a) a really choice murder in a locked room, (b) a mysterious mastermind or (c) a really good?looking adventuress with slant eyes.

Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different.

I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

I think older women still have a full life. Maybe the writers don't address it these days, but it doesn't change the fact.

Like actors and writers who are on and off again in terms of employment, I had a very unstructured life.

Star Trek writers came in with supreme egos. I had worked with many of them before and found them, like most science-fiction writers, very unyielding to comment. Harlan [Ellison] was in a class by himself. He gave me an outline on The Mod Squad that would have cost twenty million dollars to produce.

The qualified and visionary figures and writers depend not on media and encyclopedias; conversely, those both, need them, to run and fill its programmes and projects.

We tend to crave a "and so it is" and "so it was" that the illusion of a single perspective brings, but one thing I have learned from being in the world is that there is no such panopticon. Panopticons are for surveillance states. It behooves us as writers and artists at this moment in history to honor the unknown and the unknowable.

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

To some writers, nothing appears of so much consequence as the skillful regulation of property; because it is this much coveted object that gives birth to most disputes and most seditions.

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.

Early on, I got some criticism from other gay writers and queer theorists for being too 'assimilationist,' probably because my characters are outsiders, even in the gay world.