Quotes About Writer

He was universally charming, as only a writer in pursuit of a publisher can be.

Words, it seems, are like felt pens. If you don't use them for a while they dry up.

At some level the subject of any story or poem is always the reader, and the writer who ignores this does so at his or her peril.

Speech destroys the function of love, I think-that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words can close those love bites. it's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them.

Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much  . . . . including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster's back.

Never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself.

Just because I'm a writer doesn't mean that my personal experiences are embellished. Every life has a story.

Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.

I wear the writer pants in the family.

Love is the only energy I've ever used as a writer. I've never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?

The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.

Die Welt ist schrecklich langweilig, oder, was dasselbe ist, was an ihr interessant sein könnte, ist es nicht, solange es nicht von einem guten Schriftsteller erzählt wird.

No era un héroe, sino un hombre que se avergonzaba de haber desistido de continuar siendo lo que en su momento había sido: un odiador profundo de la grandeza, de esa obligación de tener que ser alguien en la vida, un odiador del poder. Un amante de los escritores de rostros secretos y de la discreción en la literatura.

Then, aware once more of her obligation, she asked politely: "You only wrriter, or your work also?" "I hope to teach English one day.

I think that when I wrote those early books I was timid. I still felt the incredible effrontery of announcing myself to the world (in part I mean the WASP world) as a writer and an artist. I had to touch a great many bases, demonstrate my abilities, pay my respects to formal requirements. In short, I was afraid to let myself go.

Lolling around libraries paging through books that haven't been checked out since 1975 is one of my principal joys as a writer.

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.

The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing. W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand. For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.

April 1929 saw the publication of Daughter of Earth by the radical American writer Agnes Smedley.

The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.

I'm not an academic; I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a writer, communicating ideas to the public. There is a model of how the past is, and a lot of academic archaeology is about refining the model. It's not about changing the model radically. I'm not aware of any current which is about radically changing the model. It's just me, really.