Quotes About Writer

I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

I cannot countenance the traditional belief that postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter with a 'vocation' equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to biographemes whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.

We live in a society that doesn't offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren't clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It's going to be a mess before you're finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren't words for everything. For now, we'll call it the draft of a story.

I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.

Some twenty straw piles from mine slept the writer Walter Hasenclever, one of the founders of German expressionism.

What is the use of being a writer of some note if one cannot treat oneself to such a luxury?

As a writer I happen to be interested in the interrelations between two domains of intellectual activity, between two sciences, if you prefer; the interrelations between history and philology, to be specific.

A few pages in Mein Kampf are indeed worth reading, the pages, I mean, that relate to the orator and to the difference between the orator and the writer.

The Nihilist intelligentzia had sustained the thesis that writing was merely a pastime like any other, an empty amusement of the writer like sports or liquor or whoring or what you will. I had never accepted that view.

The genuine writer cannot ignore the fact that the family is losing its spiritual foundation.

The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.

You forget, I said, I'm a writer and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.

Because a writer can't influence people, in the sense of making them think and feel and act as he does. He can only influence them to be more, or less, like one of their own selves. In other words, he's never understood.

Little Reuben woke up repeating word for word a long lecture by that curious old writer (one of the very few whose works have been permitted to come down to us), George Bernard Shaw, who was speaking, according to a well-authenticated tradition, about his own genius.

So there we were on that ice floe, just the two of us, adrift in the polar night. Viskovitz turned and said, I'd like you to get our conversation down in black and white. It's not possible, I answered. I'm not a typist. I'm not a writer. I'm a penguin. As far as I'm concerned 'getting it down in black and white' means making more penguins. So instead, there I was a month later, standing still with an egg under my belly, remembering... I was the one who had brought up the subject.

He looked at the portrait hung on the wall behind him. It was one of the gallery's most popular pictures, Guy Kinder's brooding portrait of the crime writer, Ian Rankin, sitting in the Oxford Bar, the haunt of his fictional Edinburgh detective. Ian Rankin was looking directly at Stuart, making Stuart avert his gaze.

There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts.

I have a writer's concentration: intense, but flickering.

It isn't the pen—it's the writer; it isn't the road—it's the runner that counts.

Though rules may shape your story, you yourself must shape the rules. Beware, too, of the other man's rule. He sees the world through different eyes. Thus, George Abercroft is an action writer. "Start with a fight!" is his motto. And for him, it works.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.