Quotes About Writers

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

I definitely have loads of respect for writers and the art of writing.

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.

Writers are idiots with Underwoods.

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other writers to rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity.

I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.

All successful writers use resonance to enhance their stories by drawing power from stories that came before, by resonating with their readers' experiences, and by resonating within their own works.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion .

Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we-here, today-cannot or do not permit ourselves.

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don't have that in their lives make it through the day.

STREITFELD: Scared is a word that you often used to describe yourself. WALLACE: Writers tend to be shy, bookish people. We're always on the fringes of the party, resenting the attention paid to others. And then finally when attention is paid to you, it is great and yet part of it sucks you liver out. Deep down it was the thing you always felt would make everything OK, and then you get it, and find everything isn't OK, and you're still scared.

But fiction-writers tend at the same time to be terribly sef-conscious . Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people.

There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.

We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists

He then fell into the state of apprehension and despondency usual to writers as they wait for a verdict on their work.

Si no puedes librarte de desear pasiones, lee novelas y aventuras, que también para eso existen los escritores.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Writers' bodies don't make sense in a place like Hollywood: soft and white, defenseless in a town where everyone's defended, right up to their celluloid tits.