Quotes
Quotes about Writer
Acheson's Rule of Bureaucracy: A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. - Charles Lamb (used pseudonym Elia),
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
Rice Krispies happens to be one of my favorite junk foods, just as I regard Michener as superior among junk writers.
The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says something, perhaps everything. It would be far easier (and nearly always more profitable) to become a real estate agent.
If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.
We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife.
We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife.
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum. - "In the Nature of the Physical World", 1928.
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Art thou a pen, whose task shall be To drown in ink What writers think? Oh, wisely write, That pages white Be not the worse for ink and thee.
He that readeth good writers and pickes out their flowres for his own nose, is lyke a foole.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.
The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. This is true not only of the writer, artist and scientist, but of creators in other fields...With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do, they arrange things so that they themselves become indispensable.
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
For comic writers charge Socrates with making the worse appear the better reason. [Lat., Nam et Socrati objiciunt comici, docere eum quomodo pejorem causam meliorem faciat.]
The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
