Writer Quotes
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Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.
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In 1999 and 2000, when I was a young editorial writer at the 'Post', the 'Post' won the public service medal two years running.
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Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.
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I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.
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If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.
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That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.
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I feel like it's a good time to be a writer. I'm terminally optimistic. It seems like the publishing industry is in the middle of a big transition, and that the rules of the game are still sorting themselves out.
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When you're reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call "taking up with a writer," something happens.
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The Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it.
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I once knew a writer who, after saying beautiful things about the sea, passed through a Pacific hurricane, and he became a changed man.
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Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.
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Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!
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I don't know if I want to be a writer.
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I have learned, as has many another better writer, to summon inspiration to my call as soon as I begin my day's stint, and not to hang around waiting for it. Inspiration is merely a pretty phrase for the zest to work. And it can be cultivated by anyone who has the patience to try. Inspiration that will not come at its possessor's summons is like a dog that cannot be trained to obey. The sooner both are gotten rid of, the better.
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I got a lovely check today from being a writer that I earned by sitting at home. That's rewarding.
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A writer is a world trapped in a person.
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I wrote about the life of a housing officer in Britain, in a pretty rough area of London. Maybe it was because I'm a big-mouth and an exhibitionist, and I'm slightly egotistical. All those things have to come together for a writer.
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If you really want to be a writer, nobody can stop you - and if you don't, nobody can help you.
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The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.
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If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.
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If you wait for inspiration to write you're not a writer, you're a waiter.
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You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.
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He the writer must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers.
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I think it's very, very, very hard to get a book published. I never want to be one of those teachers that say, 'don't do this, ' because how sad would the world be if people didn't create art and write? But, it's not an easy journey being a writer.
