Quotes About Writers

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they all made the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.

I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.

Most writers stick to what they know. The black experience is our experience, so it's not that challenging for us. That's why sometimes you'll see writers that start off telling black stories, but later branch out into other material. People say they "sell out." No, they evolve as writers.

I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.

The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot. Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure. Norman Mailer and Vidal, the same thing. The bestselling writers now, there's no great animal energy with them.

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

Ninety-five percent of all writers who write do not get published, but 100 percent of all writers write because they have a voice in their head. The vast majority of writers simply write because they have to.

I don't believe that fiction is dead. I know there are some people who believe that it's an outdated art form, and that to express truth today you need to work in different forms, to write books where it's perhaps not clear what's fiction and what's memoir. I have nothing against those books and love many of them very much. But we have enough space for everyone, traditional realists and hybrid writers, and experimental writers all.

The Night Journal received two awards that I'm terribly proud of - -the Spur from Western Writers of America, and the Willa Literary Award from Women Writing the West. Both these groups are filled with great writers and good people.

Anything would be better in the US than what you have. As a government it's really very low quality, given the fact that this country produces eminent intellectuals, has great universities, and then the people who arrive in government are very mediocre. The Latin American situation has been very different in the first place, because writers have spoken for those who have no voice. The rate of illiteracy, poverty, joblessness in Latin America has been so great throughout our history that if the writers didn't speak out for the people, nobody would.

I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.

I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers.

Of course, I don't mean to imply that all writers are working in the deep waters that border on the divine. Most writers are just trying to pay the bills, like anyone else - Stephanie Meyers is the literary equivalent of a television evangelist. Fork over twenty bucks and she'll help you forget your troubles for a while. I certainly don't fault her for her success, but I hope she has no illusions about the quality of her craft or the longevity of her efforts.

Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.

Writers often have a 'drunk' that is different than anyone else's. That's why it's so insidious and so damning. First of all, because they can write when they're drinking - or they think they can. A lot of writers will tell me - and this is the latest one I've heard - you drink while you're thinking about what to write, but when you actually write, you sober up.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

There are many people who say, I write for myself. I think that if you write and publish, then you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Many writers say that they write to be loved. I place myself among those writers.

In college, I had a lot of friends who were writers and wanted to be writers and I felt intimidated by it. I just didn't know if I had any gift or voice and I had no confidence about it.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

Writers have always liked my stuff, pretty much. That's what I wanted - I think my goal wasn't to get rich and famous, necessarily, though I cared about that. I always thought, "Oh, this could be a hit," or "that will sell records." But the first thing I wanted was that people who knew a lot about music, or had taste-making qualities, they would like my stuff. Writers, people like that.

We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

Writers are completely out of touch with reality. Writers are crazy [people]. We create conflict - for a living. We do this all the time, sometimes on a weekly basis, we create horrible, incredible circumstances and then figure a way out of them. That's what we do.

I have to say that The Simpsons comes from a huge number of great writers headed by Al Jean, the show-runner, and the work that they do is really fantastic. It's a blast just to sit around with them in the writers' room and listen to all the filthy jokes that will never get on the air.

I'm overwhelmed by writers. Most people aren't impressed by writers, but if you can draw a cartoon or a picture, they think you're magic.

Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.

To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing.

New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and bring it back clean. It enables you. Writers always feel guilty when they're doing anything but writing, and New York allows you to really write all the time if you want to - though my kids put a limit on it.

There are fewer media writers in traditional settings. That is a beat that many legacy brands cannot afford. On the other hand technology writers are writing about media in ways they didn't before. As a consequence of the shift, there is less interest in many ways in the activities at some media. If you look at coverage of media as whole, the decision-making at the three broadcast networks and the cable channels, for instance, is much less of a focus than it once was. The guts of what goes on at Fox or CNN or MSNBC probably has less impact than it once did. It certainly gets less attention.

writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers.

Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.

writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.

[A comic book writers' union] will never happen. Someone will always be willing to write Batman for free. ... You sit at a bar with an editor at a show and you see 19 people come up and pitch ideas at them. If everybody writing the top 20 books all quit and demanded, 'Union now, union forever,' those 19 guys would be getting phone calls. There will never be a union. I think things are getting better - I bet things have never been so good - but there will never be a union.

I don't want to denounce musicals because they certainly have a message they want to communicate. But with straight plays, there is a focus on what's going on between people and relationships. I think so much is happening in the world at the moment, so many changes politically and culturally, writers are writing about that.

Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

A lot of writers come from Harvard and such, and are rich, and they write under the misapprehension that poor people are stupid. So when they do write them, they are hillbillies or rednecks or Christian idiots.

I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.