Quotes About Knowledge

Clark Gregg and I are around the same age. He has been an actor and is a writer. But with a first-time director, there is a way to talk about things they might not know. Because Clark was an actor, though, he knew more about the process than most first-time directors.

I've matured as a writer and human being. I've got some wisdom under my belt.

As a food writer, it's my job to know each and every cuisine on this planet as well as I can.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

One of my favorite things, as a critic, was finding books by new writers who possessed a distinctive voice and vision, an inventive gift for storytelling. I also loved immersing myself in works of nonfiction that taught me something about the world, that made the past come alive or shed light on hidden corners of history or the news.

Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

Writers who don't read can't write well. It's that simple. The more you read, the better you read, the better you'll write. The upside is that you can't read too much, and even 'junk' reading can be constructive.

One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are.

I think some people think that writers read and read and read, get the information, and then write. That's not how it works. Often, you write yourself into a dark place where you don't know what you need to know, so you go get the information.

If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Anyone who writes anything on any subject is standing on the shoulders of 900 people who've come before you.

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.

For if the mystery concealed of old is made manifest to the Apostles through the prophetic writings, and if the prophets, being wise men, understood what proceeded from their own mouths, then the prophets knew what was made manifest to the Apostles.