Quotes About Writer

Chapter One. The Bride. He held up the book then. I'm reading it to you for relax. He practically shoved the book in my face. By S. Morgenstern. Great Florinese writer. The Princess Bride. He too came to America. S. Morgenstern. Dead now in New York. The English is his own. He spoke eight tongues. Here my father put down the book and held up all his fingers. Eight. Once in Florin City...

All I can suggest to you is, if he parentheses bug you, don't read them.

He said a political writer must be careful. He quoted Auden: A writer's politics are more dangerous to him than his cupidity. He said, Political sentimentality is as bad as any other kind. You have to acknowledge ambiguity, complexity. There is a kind of death that creeps into your prose when you're trying to illustrate a principle, no matter how worthy.

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

As a modern Austrian writer—Sigismund von Radecki—has well said, "It is not art, but rather the archetype towards which art strives to ascend."2

In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

Dictionary he identifies 'what ills the scholar's life assail': 'Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail'. The last of these was always a genuine possibility: it was common for people owing even modest debts to be incarcerated, and several writers known to Johnson had suffered this fate—the

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

Patriotism and its results--wars--give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades. Every writer, teacher, and professor is more secure in his place the more he preaches patriotism. Every Emperor and King obtains the more fame the more he is addicted to patriotism.

To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

What he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

Although we had had no precise exponents of realism, yet after Pushkin it was impossible for a Russian writer to depart too far from actuality. Even those who did not know what to do with "real life" had to cope with it as best they could. Hence, in order that the picture of life should not prove too depressing, the writer must provide himself in due season with a philosophy.

I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

I think it is probably more important to attend specialized conventions for a journeyman writer than any other, but it's useful at all stages of a career, if for nothing else, to find out how the industry is working at any given time.

I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.

Twitter is incredibly useful. It's a great example of how the Internet is changing the way we engage with information and text. Above all else, this change in the nature of engagement is fascinating for me as a writer.

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.

Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.

I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach.