Quotes About Writers

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

The truth is that most writers are needy.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.

So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We're sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.

As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.

People assume any twentieth-century white male writer must be an alcoholic.

Never believe a writer. Listen to them, by all means, but never believe them.

Great writers teach as well as entertain.

I think the responsibility of writers is to convey the feelings that exist in the moment, the moment of that sharp and immediate pang of sour smiles when your heart suddenly starts pumping ice through your veins and becomes difficult and visual perception takes on the appearance of cinematographer on Cops, with unsteady frames and jostling scenes, running through a backyard chasing perpetrators.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of attention, and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied but to be read.

Every writer he ever met was a drunk

Régis Jauffret got it right when he said that he was disgusted by writers who think of their readers.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

If there is such a thing as media theory, there should also be format theory. Writers have too often collapsed discussions of format into their analyses of what is important about a given medium. Format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It

The same skills needed for writing are needed or reading. Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it…

En nuestro país, a causa de la escasa experiencia en tentativas de transformar la historia en novela, se exige todavía a los libros que sean legibles y sobre todo que se entiendan. Es decir, que estén al nivel mental de quienes los lean, lo que nos lleva a que se jaleen, con alegría irresponsable, obras de escritores poco exigentes, aunque ese vergonzoso jaleo, por fortuna, no todo el mundo lo acepta, o mejor dicho, llega a entenderlo

Cuál es la lógica entre las cosas? Realmente ninguna. Somos nosotros los que buscamos una entre un segmento y otro de vida. Pero ese intento de dar forma a lo que no la tiene, de dar forma al caos, sólo saben llevarlo a buen puerto los buenos escritores.

On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

The writers of Scripture enter into the random everyday depths of popular life, taking seriously whatever is encountered there, clinging to the concrete and refusing to systematize experience in concepts.

What people eat is not well documented. Food writers prefer to focus on fashionable, expensive restaurants whose creative dishes reflect little of what most people are eating.

White, older showrunners told me, 'Why do you want to hire an all-Latinx writers room? Hire who's best for the show - don't get caught up in that.' And I was like, 'No.' For such an intimate show about the details of a culture? You can't fake that. The room needs to reflect the makeup of the show.