Quotes About Writer

What we have to work with is hints and allegations, really, evidence, sometimes only a trace, that points to something lying behind the text. It's useful to keep in mind that any aspiring writer is probably also a hungry, aggressive reader and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of literary history and literary culture.

reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

What happens, if the writer is good, is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies.

The intimacy of the detail - why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer's bible.

Glück des Schriftstellers ist der Gedanke, der ganz Gefühl, ist das Gefühl, das ganz Gedanke zu werden vermag.

Een schrijver is een persoon voor wie schrijven moeilijker is dan voor andere mensen.

There is nothing more German than this writer and his life's work - nothing that could be conceivably more German in the old, joyous, free and spiritual sense of the word, the one that has given the German name its best reputation and earned it the gratitude of mankind. - Thomas Mann; about Hermann Hesse

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.

Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.

Stories are often layered with meaning. If you don't learn from a story's message, if you gloss over or dismiss it--even if it's a message with which you don't agree--then you have wasted not only your time but the writer's time as well.

Isn't it exhausting, one could ask, this emotionally wrought involvement with so many sources, so many intimacies? For most of us it would be. But it is this novelist's heart, this writer's strange and insatiable passion for observation, for describing in all of its spectacular complexity the bewildering and plentiful world, that raises this brilliant and unruly book from its time, and makes it a classic of cultural journalism.

This witty and spirited adventure sets up a potential gold mine of lore for the writer to plunder in future sequels . . . a fun and original page-turner.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his…. It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

This is not to say a writer has only one voice or is limited to the scope of her backyard. But in some sense her work must begin there, at the rootwad. And wherever she travels she must take that place with her, must feel in the dark of memory for its shape.

Not as long as you are here, Monsieur Corte," the manager replied warmly, as he had a great number of times since the Fall of France. Corte was, in the list of celebrities, the fourteenth to arrive from Paris since the sad events began and the fifth writer to seek refuge at the luxury hotel.

In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal . For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness.

Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.

Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer. I find it all remarkably useless.

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

I also have a role model back in New Zealand, a woman called Miranda Harcourt. She's an actress and a writer. Her willingness to stay open to material is really great. I read a lot, and I try to watch and listen to diverse material.

To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.

To be considered part of the fashion zeitgeist is fun, but it will never steal my focus from my qualifications as a food writer, presenter and communicator.

I see myself in public service in Zimbabwe. I would prefer an advisory role - cabinet secretary, minister of trade or the arts, or something like that. I don't want to be just a writer.