Quotes About Writers

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

Publishers seem to be in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Well, the publishers have no idea what a writer is.

Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.

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

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of the poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies--in holiness and mirth.

Wherever I've lived my room and soon the entire house is filled with books; poems, stories, histories, prayers of all kinds stand up gracefully or are heaped on shelves, on the floor, on the bed. Strangers old and new offering their words bountifully and thoughtfully, lifting my heart. But, wait! I've made a mistake! how could these makers of so many books that have given so much to my life—how could they possibly be strangers?

One of the seminar organizers joins me. Is Yvonne giving you a hard time? Yvonne. My nemesis is none other than the cadaver beheader. As if turns out, she's also the lab manager, the person responsible when things go wrong, such as writers fainting and/or getting sick to their stomach and then going home and writing books that refer to anatomy lab managers as beheaders.

His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity.

I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself.

Still, Berlin was the new center of Jewish intellectual and literary life. Writers and thinkers from the Russian Empire had fled there, and young and old now frequented the same cafés and competed for the same commissions from American Jewish publications—getting paid in dollars was the best way to survive Germany's galloping inflation. Dubnow

The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the "creative intelligentsia," as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for "political workers" exceeded those of all other groups.

Anna is the sort of woman who writers write about, Tom. Somewhere in the third act, women like her save characters like you and me from ourselves. She's the loveliest literary device in the world.

I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read books and stories by bood writers. It's a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk once said about his field, Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.

Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.

He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.

This is what separates even the most liberal writers from their conservative counterparts—the willingness to flay politicians on their own side.)

The anonymity of the Gospel writers was respected for decades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never entitled, never named.

the Gospel writers compiled not necessarily what Jesus exactly said or did, but what the believing community collectively understood to be the tenor of his actions and sayings.

Children read books, not reviews," he wrote. "They don't give a hoot about the critics." And: "When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority." Best of all—and to the relief of authors everywhere—children "don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.

And after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, we have few examples of any literary activity except by religious writers (who, like cockroaches, seem capable of surviving any catastrophe).

Like all apocalyptic writers, the author despises people in general and fantasizes about the destruction of everyone different from him and his chosen group.

The difference between mainstream fiction and literature is what their writers do with words; the former places its emphasis on the story rather than the language used to tell that story; in literature, the language is the story; that is, the story is primarily a vehicle for a linguistic display of the writer's rhetorical abilities.

Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God, and it was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications, and non sequiturs.