Quotes About Writer

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one – or both. Usually both. –

This happens with special frequency to the writer, like Camus, who appeals directly to a generation's image of what is exemplary in a man in a given historical situation. Unless he possesses extraordinary reserves of artistic originality, his work is likely to seem suddenly denuded after his death.

A writer who acts as public conscience needs extraordinary nerve and fine instincts, like a boxer. After a time, these instincts inevitably falter. He also needs to be emotionally tough. Camus was not that tough, not tough in the way that Sartre is.

The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.

But it has been my way—as a woman, but also as a writer—to speak of the kinds of human experience so many of us are taught to believe we should keep hidden. I am speaking here of those so-called "shameful" emotions like envy, anger, self-pity, vanity, pride—the moments I believe all of us experience in which we display our least heroic but possibly most human selves. Over my many years as a writer, I

In few places is there such a high concentration of hypocrisy as at a writer's funeral.

In times when religious or political faith or hope predominates, the writer functions totally in unison with society, and expresses society's feelings, beliefs, and hopes in perfect harmony.

When a writer is born into a family, Czes?aw Mi?osz once famously said, the family is finished. You could forget about having any more secrets. You could forget about hiding what you didn't want others to know. You were going to be exposed, hung out to air, and by a traitor from within. But later I wondered, Is it the family that's really finished or simply the writer's place within it? Could a family still be a family with parts missing?

There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer.

The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

Comedy will always be central to what I do, it's just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.

I want to try and be instinctive as a writer and director.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

There is no such thing as a Bollywood hero or Hollywood hero. All you see on the screen is the lead actor's interpretation of the role that has been conceived by the writer.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

The importance not just of history, but of roots - that a writer must have then to nurture, to remember if he is to endure.

The greatest and most fundamental mission of a writer is to vanquish falsehoods, bear testimony to the truth of history, and restore dignity to mankind.

Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer's and the reader's fall.16 As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations.

The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of his life a greater degree of compassion for suffering humankind.