Quotes About Writer

The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

There is an amazing feminist writer called Lindy West; she wrote a very nice piece for The New York Times. She wrote about Woody Allen, saying if we can't go after your work or your career, we will go after your legacy. You will never be remembered the same way. I think a lot of women will have to take solace in that.

I have a strong work ethic, yet I'm incredibly lazy as well. The problem with being a writer is that everything you do can be called research. Sitting in the pub is research. Reading the newspaper can be research.

For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written manifestation of the steampunk ethos.

So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it's the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.

When you're doing characters from famous novels, you have a responsibility as an actor to make it what the writer intended. And then you add and expand from there to create a three-dimensional performance.

I was supposed to be cleaning out the barn, but I was usually reading romance novels. That's how you grow up to be a thriller writer.

My number one goal as a thriller writer is to entertain you. But I've got a chance to not only entertain people, but have them close my book and be smarter having read it.

I would quite like to become a mainstream thriller writer, obviously, because I enjoy writing those stories, and it is the best way to secure your career.

I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents.

My father was a writer/director/producer, so instead of throwing a ball around, our bonding was going to see movies. And at an early age, I knew if I wanted to impress my dad, it was not going to be by throwing a ball real far.

Don't let it be anxiety; let that uncertainty generate excitement. If you can't make that switch you shouldn't be a writer, or an artist, or a fighter. You won't enjoy it.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black—so that the paint will not get between us and the picture.

To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten.

Don't you sometimes find daily life almost unbearably poetic? Minute curiosity is a requirement of the travel writer – as it is of the biographer, novelist and poet. The significance of the trivial is what makes a piece of travel writing human, not the stuntish business of being the first person to paddle the Congo. Out there on the road, I have often found that the most aimless and boring interludes yield, in the long run, the most fertile material.

The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.

The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.

Over a period of time it's been driven home to me that I'm not going to be the most popular writer in the world, so I'm always happy when anything in any way is accepted.

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

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.