Quotes About Writers

The things the writers have me doing on 'Suburgatory' are insane. I think they think it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there's arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.

People are trying to get in?" "Sure. Just like that guy on the train. Curiosity seekers, freelance writers, photographers. It's amazing. It's barely been a day, Alice, and already the ghouls are descending. I figure by tomorrow someone'll be selling T-shirts and souvenir beer mugs.

Most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers.

Writing is not a great profession as a lot of writers proclaim. I write because this is something I can do. Another thing—very often I think a lot of writers write because they have failed to do other things. How many writers can't drive? A lot. They're not practical. They are not capable in everyday life.

Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that's been brewing since Cervantes.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

The relationships that we have with writers are quite a thing; they're different from the ones we have with actors or musicians or composers or politicians. Everything for me is the writer; without him, I don't exist. So he is first. The actor gets all the fame and glory, but I don't know about endurance.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers. People seem to think there is some connection between talking and writing, but I love to talk and if there were some connection between the two of them I would be the most prolific writer in the history of the world.

I must suppose that reading wonderful writers may, inadvertently, teach an avid reader a great deal -- not only about life and other matters, but about how to write. Therefore doubtless I have benefited from frequent immersions in the glowing genius of others. It would be nice to think so. (I do actually think so). But to improve my skills will never be the prompting force of my reading -- that's just literary lust.

A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.

It is now necessary for me to use the rather hackneyed phrase 'meanwhile, back at the ranch.' The word 'hackneyed' here means 'used by so, so many writers that by the time Lemony Snicket uses it, it is a tiresome cliché.

I have learned to respect ideas, wherever they come from. Often they come from clients. Account executives often have big creative ideas, regardless of what some writers think.

Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.

Los poetas, los escritores, los sabios y las voces de su tiempo, forman un coro, el himno que comparten es el mismo: los grandes y pequeños se unen, lo hermoso vive, lo demás muere, y todo es absurdo excepto el honor, el amor y lo poco que el corazón conoce.

Seek the fellowship of other writers. A writers conference is a great way to meet other scribes. Email makes it easy to keep in touch. Consider forming a circle of such friends.

Well, all I can tell you is every Jewish man I come across is making a move on me." Not funny. By "curving" this language, the writers came up with a classic line. Who knows how many drafts it took? ELAINE: Well, something's goin' on here, 'cause every able-bodied Israelite in the county is drivin' pretty strong to the hoop.

And since this is a business, let me say I encourage self-publishing writers to set up their own publishing company as a corporation. It's not hard to do. Consider LegalZoom.com as a starting point.

The framework within which she imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers and writers.

Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.

All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..

Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.