Writer Quotes
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You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.
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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.
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My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.
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A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
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I do find that people are incredibly naive about what it is to be a writer. Like you would pay an incredible amount of money for an MFA program and still not have the slightest idea of how one goes about becoming a writer. So, I'm always flabbergasted when people say, "Oh, I was invited to do a reading, but I'm not going to read because I don't have a book.".
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Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.
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I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.
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We are now, all of us, cinematographers for the movie of our own lives. Not the star. Not the director. Not even the writer.
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I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.
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A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.
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My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'
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Technically, I could have said “journalist” or “writer.” However, admitting to these professions is like uttering a special secret password to Travel Hell. No one wants journalists or writers in their country because they have a habit of writing things, and sometimes these things are even true.
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What no wife of a writer can ever understand...is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.
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I'm a writer and a photographer - I'm totally aware that doesn't always translate to TV.
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If you're a writer there will come at least one morning in your life when you wake up and want to kill your agent.
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The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future.
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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.
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It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.
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To be a great actor you just need to comprehend, so that's why I became a writer.
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My agent is so totally honest, which is just what every writer needs. She won't let me sell a crappy book, even if I want to.
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I'm a very emotional writer. I always need to have a boyfriend. I always need to have some food. I always need to have a heater at my feet, and I drink this thing called Cool Brew, which I found in Louisiana. It's like condensed coffee.
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All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
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Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
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Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).
