Writers Quotes
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The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.
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Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
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One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
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So when I got the chance to do my first talk show, 50 years ago last month, I never had any writers. There was no budget - it was just me and the camera and my friend who was the director. I talked about what I'd done that week.
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Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak.
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I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.
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Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
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It would be great if teenagers could make movies. It's sad how some writers think they can write about stuff they don't understand.
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“Writers are spies. Outsiders. Believers in the turning pages.”
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In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.
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I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken that by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.
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All that a Pulitzer really does is give the obit writers something to put between the commas after your name.
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It is a true observation of ancient writers, that as men are apt to be cast down by adversity, so they, are easily satiated with prosperity, and that joy and grief produce the same effects. For whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight they fight from ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
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One of the biggest problems for beginning writers is this need to over-explain.
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Russian writers enjoy almost sacred status.
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I'm really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while. I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.
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Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.
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I adore the company of other writers because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course, we get each other in a unique way.
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No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
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That's all we writers have, anyway; our minds and imaginations. To allow censors even the tiniest space in there with us can only lead to dullness, imitation, and mediocrity.
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We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.
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I've worked with some of the best of them. Not just directors like Sam Peckinpah and David Lynch, but writers like Sam Shepard and singers like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.
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While my stories are experimental, they're also very traditional. I love the works of the great Russian writers like Pavel Chekhov and Lev Tolstoy, and their ability to portray our human struggles and joys.
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I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.
