Quotes About Writers

It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.

I just kind of talk about what's happening in my life and it's kind of like a therapy session. Usually something good comes out of that. Or sometimes other writers will come to me with ideas and then I'll put my own spin on it. It's usually really collaborative and open and it's very therapeutic for me as well.

There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.

You can't control how things that you're involved with are received. But 'The Thick of It' wasn't intended as an instruction manual. Writers like hearing how bits of this stuff have got out into the world - but it was not meant to be a joyful celebration of the way these people behave.

As humans with egos and feelings, none of us wants to be pilloried. But as thinkers and writers, it's our job to express opinions forthrightly and without qualifying them out of existence.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.

I've noticed, as a comedy fan, that I really like Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino because when they're funny, they're actually funny. It's not like when other dramatic writers have comedy, and I'm just like, 'Well, that's not funny. Why are you even trying to make a joke here?'

There is a whole generation of romance readers and writers who suffer from what I like to think of as 'Thorn Birds' Fever.

work contained biographies of famous men (and one woman) from the fifteenth century: everyone from popes, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops to assorted scholars and writers, including Niccoli and Poggio. What these illustrious figures had in common was that Vespasiano knew them all.

He quoted Saint Jerome's praise that learned men were like stars in the heavens, and the prophet Daniel's that they shine like the sun. "All evil is born from ignorance," he wrote. "Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness, especially those authors from ancient times."35

Punctuation comes from the Latin root punctus, or "point." Those funny dots, lines, and squiggles help writers point the way. To help readers, we punctuate for two reasons: 1. To set the pace of reading. 2. To divide words, phrases, and ideas into convenient groupings.

Just as all writers were beginners once, so were all novels. They all went through rough stages, even the ones by our most hallowed masters.

Some of us are born sensitive. And if, on top of that, we are pulled about in different directions (both emotionally and physically), we might just end up becoming writers.

Normally writers do not talk much,because they are saving their conversations for the readers of their book- those invisible listeners with whom we wish to strike a sympathetic chord.

Some of us are born sensitive. And if, on top of that, we are pulled about in different directions (both emotionally and physically), we might just end up becoming writers. No, we don't become writers in schools of creative writing. We become writers before we learn to write. The rest is simply learning how to put it all together.

A thorough survey of Randolph's reading defeats such an effort. The Virginian had, certainly, a lively interest in the writers of his day, but his admiration for the Romantics was strictly qualified, as his correspondence with Francis Walker Gilmer, Brockenbrough, Francis Scott Key, and Josiah Quincy shows.

Writers rarely set out to be national writers. They need small, intimate worlds, full of details; the macro scale of countries, especially those as wide and various as India, cannot be their direct material.

Los escritores contemporáneos no se leen los unos a los otros, sino que se vigilan.

D]ie meisten Schriftsteller sind in einer Krise oder haben gerade eine Krise überwunden oder befürchten eine Krise. Daher genießen sie die Krise eines Kollegen beinahe wollüstig.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn't as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.

In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.