Quotes About Writers

We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.

For among writers there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good.

It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.

One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He

But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.

The basic point to underscore here, however, is that both writers refer to Christians and their religion as different, and objectionably so, and not as simply one type of Roman-era religious option among and like others.

marked the first time that Pigafetta tested his firsthand experiences against the claims of ancient writers, in this case Pliny

Our DNA has a galactic history. True writers, composers, fine artists writers, who go deep within themselves, bring forth galactic information. We are soul-libraries of the galaxy.

France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.

As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don't enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets.

The great nineteenth-century writers — Hawthorne and Melville, Thoreau and Emerson, Twain and James — were skeptics, transcendentalists, and humanists, and not even God knows what Emily Dickinson was.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.

Ako stvarno misliš da pisci imaju moralne vrednosti koje daju svojim likovima, onda si stvarno naivan. ?ak i pomslo glup.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

Some writers later, describing the events of that night and day, wrote that Wan'yen of the Altai had seen a spirit-dragon of the river and become afraid. Writers do that sort of thing. They like dragons in their tales.

Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.

both were writers of high ambition, with

To us this ladder has a descending movement, because the ascent , which evokes effort and difficulty, is toward the bottom. I say ascent downward because we ordinarily believe the descent is easy. The writers I love are descenders , explorers of the lowest and deepest.

That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn.

long-legged Yankee lies and substitute approved books by Southern writers.

The romantic glorification of the Army of Northern Virginia by generations of Lost Cause writers has obscured this truth.

I love this snarky line about critics. It comes from the English playwright John Osborne: Asking a working writer how he feels about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

Them sportswriters don't even know how to put uniforms on, most of 'em.