Quotes About Meaning

I think that's what a lot of writers do, create a totally fantastical scenario that is a reflection of something else going on in their life.

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view. It's informed by our own understanding of spirituality; things that matter, things that are important to us. I write about things that matter for me.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.

I wanted to be that quirky girl who writes funny songs that still have meaning.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.

I have a boundless passion for Flaubert. It's unthinkable to me that someone might not have read 'Madame Bovary.' He writes with a scalpel. Everything has meaning. My students were not allowed not to like him!

It's true and it's easily said that language is material, and something does materialise as one writes.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

Letters are something from you. It's a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Writing is a communication.

In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.