Quotes About Writer

I got to do Disney Sunday movies. I got to do a TV pilot there. And it really helped me to realise that I needed to not just be a writer, but a producer, to see my work up on the screen the way I wanted it to look and play.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

In the work of a writer of genius, we rediscover our own neglected thoughts.

I find a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer or secretary, who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works.

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating, by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer's make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road he wants to go. I would only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. [ 1967 interview ]

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous--so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction.

Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration ... and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose—as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.

Don't imagine that a college education is necessary to success as a writer. Far from it. Some of our college men are dead-heads, drones, parasites on the body social, not alone useless to the world but to themselves.

How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader?

To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative -- this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality.

yet voice is something like the fingerprint of the writer—not the persona on the page but the writer with her own particular linguistic quirks, sentence rhythms, and recurring images. The memoirist needs to have this fingerprint too, even if she only speaks as herself.

No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.

Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.

The world was doing its best to ignore the fact that I was a writer.

You and I are bona fide evidence that a writer's dreams can come true." "Maybe we should warn them that sometimes those dreams turn into nightmares,

Morosov then reminded Gabriel of his impeccable lineage. He was, to borrow the term coined by the Russian philosopher and writer Zinoviev, a true Homo Sovieticus—a Soviet Man.

Nabokov changed my life," Max said. "I was going to be a writer, and then I read Lolita and I decided to go to law school instead. It looked easier.

C'est le destin de tout écrivain que d'être un traitre.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father ' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

No one can achieve profound characterization of a person (or place) without appealing to semi-unconscious associations. To sharpen or intensify a characterization, a writer makes use of metaphor and reinforcing background-weather, physical objects, animals- details which either mirror character or give characters something to react to...The game proves more dramatically than any argument can suggest the mysterious rightness of a good metaphor.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

Oh," I say. I have run out of dialogue. Sometimes I wish I were a character in a book and there as a writer out there giving me things to say. This is one of those times. I just stand there, feeling stupid.