Writers Quotes

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

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.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean.

They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

I'm more concerned with getting them to find and strengthen their original voice as writers rather than imposing my own subjective tastes, judgements or sensibility on the project.

The main advantage of the omniscient approach is that it's the easiest to handle. That's the major reason so many writers select it.

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.

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.

There are few words in the music business or in art that I'll say people or some writers are overgenerous with words like 'legend' or 'genius', 'he's a pioneer' and all of that.

The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire.

I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.

I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular "ism," but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

Well, so far, at least, my own ideas always take priority over those of other writers. As long as the well doesn't run dry, I imagine this will be the case.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

I don't have a room full of writers pitching ideas. It's just me out of my head.

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.