Quotes About Writers

We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.

The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct historical shadows to the generation immediately following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.

I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.

In TV, you don't know everything. The writers only give you scripts before you shoot the episodes. They keep you on your nerve.

The network shows tend to be run, in general, in my experience, by committee, and it's hard for actors and writers to do their jobs.

When you're doing 22 shows on network television, the writers are going on vapors towards the end and, as an actor, you're just trashed by the end.

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

Jessica Battilana has been my kindred cooking spirit for more than 10 years. Our careers as cooks and writers have taken us through the same Bay Area restaurants, bakeries, magazines, and newspapers.

Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature--match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here...he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes. (Hornby's thoughts after reading Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly)

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.

According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellbound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads.

Writers are made -- forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities -- over the course of many, many moons.

exposure is not a measurable resource. If someone asks you to write for exposure, ask them how much exposure. Like, have them measure it. Will it be ten picameters of exposure? I usually ask at least seven nanoliters' worth. If they can prove it, fuck yeah, great. But exposure is a hard thing to prove. Let me utter my refrain yet again: Writers, like hikers, can die from exposure.

That it is ancient and, as some writers claim, that it may be of non-Doggish origin in part, is borne out by the abundance of jabberwocky which studs the tales—words and phrases (and worst of all, ideas) which have no meaning now and may have never had a meaning.

I've heard writers defend some pretty appalling stuff by arguing that they have an obligation to depict the world as it is, but fiction has no such obligation. It's not a mirror to reality, it's a prism. It refracts experience. Also, I think some writers are reluctant to admit that part of their aim is to shock the reader, and that's a downward spiral. We have, as consumers, become increasingly inured to violence. Most of us are pretty hard to shock.

Unfortunately we have to remember we're scientists, not writers of popular semifictional archaeological claptrap.

In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us.

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character, not for comedy, not for a philosophic view of life, but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that . . . they only have to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things