Quotes About Writers

The term sci-fi, which most science fiction writers loathe, I will reserve for those motion pictures that claim to be science fiction but are actually based on comic strips. Or worse.

These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.

I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that.

Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I've long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers - one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps.

So I made a request. I said to the writers, I have a minor request that I just want to play a loser.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking.

We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.

There aren't many shy writers left.

I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.

For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.

In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.

Although they sometimes claim objectivity, historians are the most subjective of all writers. Hidden behind the thousands of facts unearthed by research, they safely arrange the world to reflect their own vision.

All day I was surrounded by earnest men with furrowed brows who read Balzac in the mail-room. The more jovial ones delivered double entendres with a wry, jaded air, not coming out from behind their desks. Sex was something other people did. Sometimes the writers swept in with an exotic air, smelling faintly of alcohol, flushed and distracted. If they noticed you the first time, they would forget the next time they came in.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark-card store, and I used to save up my allowance and would buy them all. I even bought real lemons like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations [laughing]. I thought everything in the Modern Library must be great.

Opinions...are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open up avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.

You have seven writers in your basement?" Donald nods, signing, "They like it here. There's a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don't usually make much trouble.

The penthouse bar had an even more commanding view, and craft cocktails named after local or formerly local writers and their books--- the Anne Rice blood orange martini, the Tsukiyama Samurai, the Christopher Moore Demon, the Joy Luck Cocktail.

She's always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They're like personal friends to her.

Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Eighty percent of the writers met formal criteria for a major mood disorder, compared with thirty percent of controls matched for age, education, and sex.

el Barrio de las Letras, el barrio en el que habían establecido su residencia estudiantes, artistas, escritores, pintores, el barrio donde Madrid no cierra ni siquiera al amanecer.

Because we are four creative people - four writers - there was no way that we were ever going to be satiated doing the same thing over and again. Change was inevitable for us. And a very natural thing.

It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.