Quotes About Writers

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

I envy other writers who claim to have a backlog of books they'd like to write.

When I present those clip shows and movie mistakes and things, the persona the writers adopt for me is unimpressed, superior, very sarcastic - I'm not any of that. I can do it, but that's not what I'm like.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.

For every person who passes on the opportunity to write Spider-Man or Superman, I guarantee there are 5000 hungry writers who would give their eye-teeth to do it. But just because they want to do it, it doesn't mean they are capable of doing it.

I know, just from directing television, where you have a huge support system of producers and writers and a script supervisor - not just the cast but a crew of 100 people - there are, as a director, hundreds of questions that you have to answer every day.

We have so many talented writers. Companies need to understand that smaller writers also need to be supported.

Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

Other writers tell me about these bushel baskets delivered at the front door. If I've gotten 50 letters over the last 18 years, I'd be surprised.

One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.

This is the first lesson for writers - or anyone - who conducts interviews: If you want someone to talk, you've got to know how to listen. And good listening is a surprisingly active process. The interviewee is your focus of attention; you are there to hear what he says and thinks, exclusively.

Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don't all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media.

Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark.

Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean when we say the word "history." The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.

The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.

She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was too complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it.

And it is significant that some of the bitterest indictments of mass culture have come from writers who were, or still are, democratic socialists.

These writers illustrate the central preconception of the paranoid style—the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

B. A. Botkin's Lay My Burden Down and the Federal Writers' Project book, The Negro in Virginia.

Jezus, de Logos, zou de functie van de verwoeste tempel overnemen en de plaats waar de joden de goddelijke aanwezigheid konden ontmoeten[...]. Het jodendom en zijn heiligste symbolen waren vervangen door een triomfantelijk, strijdbaar christendom. Er loopt een spoor van haat door het Nieuwe Testament. Het is niet juist om de christelijke Bijbel te kenschetsen als antisemitisch want de schrijvers waren zelf joden.