Quotes About Writer

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

W. P. Kinsella, who was born on a farm near Edmunton, Alberta, has earned wide recognition for his wild imagination and rash humor as a writer.

Between 1950 and 1951, I worked as a temporary employee in the Cologne Bureau of Statistics. From summer 1951 on, I have lived as a freelance writer with a fixed postal address in Cologne but with a continually shifting place of work.

As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy.

Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

There is a tendency to over-exaggerate and over-romanticise the place of a writer in a revolution. That bothers me. I think it's inappropriate.

Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you're a writer - do you want a special pen compartment or something?' Bespoke: That's the term you want to get out there.

Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.

My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.

Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!

Even including myself, my favorite author is Eileen Spinelli, who I happen to live with. She's a terrific writer and has written several of my all-time favorites.

I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer.

Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.

The idea of writer's block or not having inspiration is totally terrifying to me.

It may interest you to know that my breakup with Terry and this mystery did not happen concurrently in real life. That is a writer's device, which places Gabriel under even greater pressure when the mystery begins to reveal itself.

A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can't be done if he keeps his distance. A literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won't really be pure.

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...

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer and son of a bitch. Just an abject human being. It's incredible that the coldest moments of his abjection are covered under an aura of nobility, which is only attributable to the power of words.