Quotes About Writer

If music without words can have "characters," then Shostakovich's characters are like those in the absurdist stories of his Leningrad writer friends: broad and bizarre and almost cartoonish at times, full of vivid eccentricities.

A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers.

In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer's work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

Nostalgia! Miss Frost cried. You´re nostalgic! She repeated. Just how old are you, William? She asked. Seventeen, I told her. Seventeen! Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.

But comedy is ingrained. A writer doesn't choose to be comic. You can choose a plot, or not to have one. You can choose your characters. But comedy is not a choice; it just comes out that way.

As a writer, I never paid much attention to the length of titles. I've just wanted them to communicate the emotional overtones of the content of a record or song that they are describing

I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

I feel that all a writer has is his own experience.

my experience as a fiction writer tells me that the deeper I look into myself, the more universal is the experience I find there.

I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.

What's this "rough life of a novelist" bullshit? You sound like an idiot. You're a writer. At least give yourself better lines.

Escribir es defender la soledad en que se está; es una acción que sólo brota desde un aislamiento efectivo, pero desde un aislamiento comunicable, en que, precisamente, por la lejanía de toda cosa concreta se hace posible un descubrimiento de relaciones entre ellas. Pero es una soledad que necesita ser defendida, que es lo mismo que necesitar de justificación. El escritor defiende su soledad, mostrando lo que en ella y únicamente en ella, encuentra.

a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards.

pareceu-me de súbito que a minha humilde vida e os reinos da verdade não estavam tão separados como supusera, que chegavam até a coincidir em certos pontos, e chorei de alegria e confiança sobre as páginas do escritor, como nos braços de um pai reencontrado.

We are very slow to recognise in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas.