Quotes About Writers

I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us - you don't go into debt to get an MFA. It's not like getting an MBA - you're not going to buy yourself out.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

You know, actors say, 'There are no bad roles, there are only bad actors.' Well, comedians, because they're also writers, believe that there are in fact bad roles.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Indonesian writers are so far behind in terms of global exposure compared with the Philippines and Japanese writers.

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.

I don't think it's going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.

In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.

I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

Insecurities and missteps can plague writers and artists who come from rural places. We worry that our provincial life experiences won't gain the approval of urban curators, so we assimilate ourselves to other, more sophisticated voices.

Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.

It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.

In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.

As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'

Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.

I got a crash-course education in urban fantasy. I suddenly had to look up all these other writers I was supposed to be in a genre with. I instantly had to become an expert in this genre I knew almost nothing about.

There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking.