Quotes About Writers

The reason so much bad poetry is written is that it is written as poetry instead of concept. And the reason the public doesn't understand poetry is that there is nothing to understand, and the reason most poets write it is that they think they understand. Nothing is to be understood or regained. It is simply to be written. By someone. Sometime. And not too often.

The canker of self-consciousness has been long in me, so like a lot of writers I not only do a thing, I see myself doing it too—it's almost like not being alone. That morning our hero skipped in his skivvies down to the shore of the sea . . . it was dark . . . the fog . . . Storytelling!

Amazon can deal directly with writers and publish—and distribute—their work to the public, what need is there for the publishing houses? The means of production are in the hands of the masses now, not in the hands of the elites.

Yet in one way or another all of us - readers and writers alike - are ultimately prisoners of the documents. And the chains are hard to see

Where is the B. who didn't at all like speculative fiction writers, with the exception of Margaret Atwood and the Jewish triumvirs: Asimov, Ellison, and Tidhar?" "Really?" I say. "Tidhar? Jesus Christ." "Yes," she screams. "Tidhar! You loved Tidhar!

This does not in any way close the argument for the development of African languages by the intervention of writers and governments. But we do not have to falsify our history in the process. That would be playing politics. The words of the Czech novelist Kundera should ring in our ears: Those who seek power passionately do so not to change the present or the future but the past—to rewrite history. There is no cause for writers to join their ranks.

Don't listen to writers. They're messed up - that's why they're writers!

The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot.

I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.

Because when you have all white men in the writers' room trying to tell the perspective of cultural appropriation or what it's like to be black or Asian in America and not necessarily knowing what it's like, that's when everything gets mixed up.

Few writers can rival Helen Fielding when it comes to fully capturing the modern woman.

We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends.

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of whom I really fell in love with.

I feel very, very grateful. I'm a lucky guy, you need a lot of luck, and then when the cameras roll, you have to have this group of writers, directors, and actors that just gel, and it seems to literally be happening more and more.

I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.

America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town - from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford - America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.

I think the most important thing we as writers can do is figure out how we define what success will mean to us and focus on that.

The first writers I knew about were Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife-- nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children.

He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.