Quotes About Writers

Writers like to feel sorry for themselves, which is easy to do in private, but when called on to feel sorry for ourselves in social situations, we will often do so by sharing terrible book tour stories.

I remember that if you went down to the Crucible or other snooker tournaments it was all the snooker writers, and then all of a sudden when the game became popular on television it wasn't only snooker writers: it was what we called special correspondents.

The secrets of small towns have fascinated writers and readers since the first psychological thriller was penned.

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.

It's been neat to find out different writing strategies. I've been in the room with so many different writers. Sometimes, you write with tracks, and other times, with acoustic guitars. That's been really a cool thing, because it brings out different lyrics with you.

What populates a comic-book convention? Well there's actors, and there's dealers, and there's comic-book artists and writers, and there's cosplay people, toy sales people, people who are selling trading cards, and people selling swords. It's not a flea market.

Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.

There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.

I think it would be very good if writers and artists take a stand in electoral politics. They've got the ability to put words together that might reach the ears of the people of the city who vote.

I think they're really linked. I think books and movies are going to go a long way together in the future. I think we writers are very important material for directors.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there.

All writers-all people-have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public... Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.

I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers.

these have characterized the work of the best American story writers of the last half-century, from John Cheever to Raymond Carver to Lorrie Moore, and the best Canadians, from Alice Munro to Margaret Atwood to Clark Blaise.

Look, Mr. uh, Wulf I appreciate your trying to warn me about this, Ireally do. But there's no such thing as vampires. They're made-up. We writers made them up. I'm sorry we did such a good job that we made the whole world paranoid, but it's true. They're fictional. Blame Bram Stoker. He started it.

Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love.

The only canons I formed in my mind were filled with the writers with whom I felt a soul inspiring resonance, the writers whose works were great to me because they gave me words, wisdom, and visions powerful enough to transform me and my world.

And partially it was exciting because of the eagerness on the part of students of all ethnicities to engage in what Foucault has called, the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. To teach a course on Black women writers and have hundreds of the students signing up, that let's you know that there has been a transformation in the academy.