Quotes About Writer

Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'

A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.

If I'm going to do a big film, I'm very choosy about what I do, because I think I want to continue - in fact I'm sure I want to continue - to stay in the realm of independent films with directors and writers who are just emerging with new ideas and a different vision that hasn't really been expressed yet.

I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.

I think the greatest reward you get as a writer is finding that people who are reasonably receptive and intelligent have liked your book.

The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.

But I'm more of a recluse when it comes down to being a writer and being a creative person rather than being a celebrity.

I'm a writer. I never expected to be recognised on the street. I never expected to get that kind of coverage, good or bad. I never expected to sell as many books as I have.

Bobcat Goldthwait

I did a series called Ned and Stacey for two years for Fox back in the 90s. I was writer on it as well as a producer, and it was very important to me that there were no contemporary references.

I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.

I'm an actor, not a writer. I'd be pretty annoyed if the writers tried to come in and hang over my shoulder telling me how to act, so I don't go in and tell them how to write.

There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.

I was really bored, pretty antisocial, and not much of a joiner, and people thought that was a problem. I hated high school. In a way, it was good... I think, for a writer, it's good to be comfortable with being on the outside.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

What has always been at the heart of film making was the value of a script. It was really the writer who could make or break a film. But as we all know, the writer has always been at the bottom of the creative heap.

The first challenge that every writer or creator of material faces is getting through the crowd so that the person you're trying to sell it to hears the pitch and is able to respond to it.

The idea is not enough. And the most annoying thing for me as a writer is that people will come up to me and say, 'Hey, I've got a great idea for a book. I'm not a writer, but I've got a great story.'

If a writer's aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood but to escape being misunderstood; but where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

But every writer, especially every novelist, has a 'message,' whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is good. Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is bad. Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.