Quotes About Writers

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

I do a lot of teaching... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive.

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.

I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests.

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.

I think it's great when writers get recognition; it doesn't happen very often. I just don't want that writer to be me. Let it be Aaron Sorkin or, you know, somebody good.

I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.

I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in.

The writers are pretty political and they want to get as big an audience as they can - they want the popular vote.

I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.

We are artists. We are writers—slightly neurotic and probably addicted to coffee, late nights, sunsets, laughter, tears, and heartache. Creativity is our drug. We lose ourselves in the smell of old books. We're bewildered by how we can live in a world this full of glory and grief and not be awestruck every moment. And we write stories to help wake people up before they fall asleep for good.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.

When you work on big commercial movies, of course there's more money involved and you can still do some good work. But with an independent, you get films that are really close to the writers' and directors' heart. Somehow it becomes a little deeper. A little more meat and not as much flash.

A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.

Historians do not have the imaginative freedoms of fiction writers, but we can learn from novelists' efforts to imagine other ways of seeing. More engagement with the environmental humanities, which try to gaze on the agency and interconnectivity of all things, will help.

To read Hotel Angeline is to celebrate how this diverse group of writers (and readers, all of them) can pool their talents and expertise to come up with such an entertaining and soul-satisfying novel.

Cada libro, cada tomo que ves tiene alma. El alma de quien lo escribió, y el alma de quienes lo leyeron y vivieron y sonaron con él.