Writer Quotes
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Eric Bentley
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A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.
Len Wein
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I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.
Alan Alda
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My impression of him, and the impressions of everyone in the office, was he is a very fine lawyer, a very hard worker, a beautiful writer and absolutely, meticulously objective.
Charles Fried
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As a writer, the most important thing for me is to continue to write, no matter where I am.
Bei Dao
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Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert "a greater degree of domination" over those women "than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture." A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she's never heard of than by a man who's beating and raping her in her home.
Bruce Bawer
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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.
Albert Payson Terhune
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You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
Louise Erdrich
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If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.
Robert Frost
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I used to want to be fully observational, but I'm just not that kind of writer. My process always changes depending on how, when, and where inspiration stiles me.
Brett Dennen
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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.
Regina Spektor
