Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
Getting enough sleep makes us better family members, friends, lovers, drivers, writers, cooks, and pretty much everything else that is of importance in our lives.
The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
It is the responsibility of filmmakers, actors and writers, who have the freedom to do the kind of work they want to do irrespective of whether it is good or not.
My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.
There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you are inspired by what the animators do.
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold such great writers. But I'm not insane - I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation.
I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.
I personally read criticism - at least by writers I enjoy - to stimulate a conversation in my own mind, and I like to think that's the function I serve for others.
I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.
It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'
Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'
I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.
My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.
Writers, especially those of us with roots in other countries, are rarely left to ourselves. We are asked to declare our allegiances, or they are determined for us.
When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.
And I have to consider myself fortunate, because there are plenty of writers who spend most of a lifetime looking for that certain something without ever finding it.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.
I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it.
It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.
Like most art forms, writing is part instinct and part craft. The craft part is the part that can be taught, and that can make a crucial difference to lots of writers.
But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.
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.
Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.
A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.
The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.
Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
There aren't enough good roles for strong women. I wish we had more female writers. Most of the female characters you see in films today are the 'poor heartbroken girl.'
The prophets and the writers of the Psalms were clear that God was continuing to work in the universe and in all history. They declared that He had created the universe.
Doesn't anybody ever want to talk about anything else besides 'Star Trek?' There were 79 episodes of the series; there were 55 different writers. I was only one of them.
I think we're so often, as writers, afraid of writing something that is less than perfect, and that fear paralyzes us. I'm a big fan of writing less than perfect things.
But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Writers are born, not made. We can hone the craft. We need to try to encourage someone and make a dialogue, suggesting ways to do something differently or how to improve.
Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
We need a new Hank Williams, a new Jimmy Webb. We need new writers, a new Tom Petty. We need people that write what they feel and what they see - things that are relevant.