-
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
Author:
Stefan Zweig
-
Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.
Author:
Marguerite Young
-
I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.
Author:
Marguerite Young
-
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.
Author:
Douglas Wood
-
And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
-
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
-
There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
-
But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
-
There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.
Author:
Dick Wolf
-
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
Author:
Jeanette Winterson
-
I'd like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.
Author:
Terri Windling
-
Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!
Author:
Terri Windling
-
Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.
Author:
Connie Willis
-
I have no ghost writers. I personally write every message and every piece of published mail.
Author:
David Wilkerson
-
We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
Author:
Margaret Whiting
-
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
Author:
Alfred Whitehead
-
The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.
Author:
Donald Westlake
-
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
Author:
Timothy West
-
Most producers I've known were writers first, and writing is a vital part of any game show. You could easily argue that the writing is the key ingredient that makes 'Jeopardy!' so great.
Author:
Randy West
-
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Author:
Eudora Welty
-
I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.
Author:
Irvine Welsh
-
All writers of the Chaldaean period associate monotheism in the closest way with unity of worship.
Author:
Julius Wellhausen
-
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.
Author:
James Welch
-
It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.
Author:
Rachel Weisz
-
It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor, I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor, I'm obliged to follow their vision.
Author:
Len Wein
-
Unfortunately, there are writers whose only concern is how good they could make themselves look on a title.
Author:
Len Wein
-
Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.
Author:
Burt Ward
-
The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
Author:
Barbara Walters
-
Writing headlines is a specialty - there are outstanding writers who will tell you they couldn't write a headline to save their lives.
Author:
Bill Walsh
-
Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.
Author:
Bill Walsh
-
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
Author:
David Wallace
-
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
Author:
David Wallace
-
It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.
Author:
Alfred Wallace
-
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Author:
Alice Walker
-
I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
Author:
Diane Wakoski
-
As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.
Author:
Andrzej Wajda
-
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
Author:
Voltaire
-
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
Author:
Vernor Vinge
-
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
Author:
Gore Vidal
-
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
Author:
Gore Vidal
-
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Author:
Gore Vidal
-
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.
Author:
Carl Vechten
-
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
Author:
John Updike
-
I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.
Author:
Hunter Tylo
-
I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at.
Author:
Anne Tyler
-
Get more women producers, writers, directors. Why should we expect men to do it for us? They can't.
Author:
Kathleen Turner
-
What we need is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that.
Author:
Kathleen Turner
-
What a revolting contrast exists in England between the slavery of women and the intellectual superiority of women writers.
Author:
Flora Tristan
-
I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.
Author:
Rose Tremain
-
Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.
Author:
Rose Tremain
-
There's a lot of Latinos right now, a lot of filmmakers and writers that are Latin too.
Author:
Benicio Toro
-
The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.
Author:
James Thurber
-
There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me.
Author:
Sheri Tepper
-
The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
Author:
Sheri Tepper
-
On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.
Author:
Donna Tartt
-
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
Author:
Amy Tan
-
When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.
Author:
Antonio Tabucchi
-
But sometimes the women writers will pitch something and I'll hear it, but the men will keep talking.
Author:
Wanda Sykes
-
The writers keep managing to turn the show in on itself, coming up with something that's well thought-out and miraculous.
Author:
Kiefer Sutherland
-
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.
Author:
Theodore Sturgeon
-
Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.
Author:
Leonard Strong
-
Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
Author:
Peter Straub
-
Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
Author:
Peter Straub
-
In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.
Author:
Lytton Strachey
-
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
Author:
Lytton Strachey
-
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Author:
Stendhal
-
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
Author:
John Steinbeck
-
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Author:
Gertrude Stein
-
George was getting alot of independence for himself in those days. He was writing more, and wanted things to go his way - where, when we first started things basically went John and Paul's way. You know, 'cuz they were the writers.
Author:
Ringo Starr
-
Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.
Author:
Leland Stanford
-
I've heard from writers and musicians and fans that they think I'm underrated.
Author:
Rick Springfield
-
Before you approach a production entity or even a potential producer, you should write up a treatment and register your show with the Writers Guild of America.
Author:
Penelope Spheeris
-
I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.
Author:
Wole Soyinka
-
I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.
Author:
John Sousa
-
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Author:
Aaron Sorkin
-
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Author:
Stephen Sondheim
-
For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Author:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
-
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Author:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
-
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.
Author:
Todd Solondz
-
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
Author:
Logan Smith
-
Challenge America grants go to the towns and hamlets of this sprawling country, where big touring companies will rarely go, and major actors, actresses, writers and artists may never appear in person.
Author:
Louise Slaughter
-
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
Author:
Dan Simmons
-
This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.
Author:
Henryk Sienkiewicz
-
But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.
Author:
Henryk Sienkiewicz
-
Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine.
Author:
John Shirley
-
I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Author:
Fulton Sheen
-
One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
Author:
Wilfrid Sheed
-
Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.
Author:
Fiona Shaw
-
With network shows, writers can be so protective of every syllable.
Author:
Michael Shanks
-
The thing with being on a series that runs that long is that the writers run out of things to do.
Author:
Ted Shackelford
-
I get so used to working with writers that my prime occupation is development.
Author:
Ridley Scott
-
Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.
Author:
Julius Schwartz
-
And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.
Author:
Stanley Schmidt
-
There may be something to the suggestion about the pace of technological change intimidating writers, though - it's been awfully hard to keep ahead of real developments.
Author:
Stanley Schmidt
-
There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.
Author:
Karl Schlegel
-
How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.
Author:
Karl Schlegel
-
Now that I'm taking some time off from school, I've been reading a lot to make sure I don't forget everything. It's mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the '40s and '50s.
Author:
Fred Savage
-
Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.
Author:
Nathalie Sarraute
-
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
Author:
Jose Saramago
-
I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
Author:
Carl Sandburg
-
I had to prepare physically every day, and I didn't leave many scraps for the writers.
Author:
Ryne Sandberg
-
I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
Author:
Richard Russo
-
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
Author:
Salman Rushdie
-
Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
Author:
Rudy Rucker
-
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
Author:
Rudy Rucker
-
Ilike ideas writers have that I might not have written. Writers are there for a reason... to write for me.
Author:
Tim Roth
-
Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing.
Author:
Judith Rossner
-
Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.
Author:
Harold Ross
-
I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.
Author:
Henry Rollins
-
I believe strongly in writing groups such as Romance Writers Of America that offer support, information and networking.
Author:
Nora Roberts
-
Between us and the writers, it was comedy hour the whole time. We could hardly get through it.
Author:
Buddy Rice
-
Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.
Author:
Anne Rice
-
You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.
Author:
Anne Rice
-
I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.
Author:
Anne Rice
-
Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.
Author:
Carl Reiner
-
There are times over different projects when I've asked the writers why people are swearing for no good reason. I tell them that it would be funnier if there weren't these swear words.
Author:
John Ratzenberger
-
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Author:
Craig Raine
-
You can take wonderfully talented actors, wonderfully talented writers and producers, and, uh, do a wonderful show!... but if it doesn't hit with the public in two minutes, it's bye-bye.
Author:
Charlotte Rae
-
Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
Author:
Manuel Puig
-
I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.
Author:
Manuel Puig
-
Writers are not meant for action.
Author:
Manuel Puig
-
There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.
Author:
J. Priestley
-
The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.
Author:
J. Priestley
-
Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
Author:
Richard Price
-
I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.
Author:
Jerry Pournelle
-
And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
Author:
Jerry Pournelle
-
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Author:
Ezra Pound
-
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Author:
Ezra Pound
-
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
Author:
Chaim Potok
-
Since, therefore, individuals as well as the public are so indebted to these writers for the benefits they enjoy, I think them not only entitled to the honour of palms and crowns, but even to be numbered among the gods.
Author:
Marcus Pollio
-
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Author:
Steven Pinker
-
All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.
Author:
Thomas Perry
-
Contrary to what many writers imply about the process, nobody forces a writer to sell his work to the film industry.
Author:
Thomas Perry
-
Mystery writers' conventions are usually good, and this one has been excellent and extremely well prepared and thought out in advance. A lot of people have given their time and their skill, and a good deal of wit, and Anchorage has made us extraordinarily welcome.
Author:
Anne Perry
-
I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.
Author:
Harvey Pekar
-
I've probably had my day in the sun. I think I've influenced a lot of comic book writers.
Author:
Harvey Pekar
-
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Author:
Octavio Paz
-
It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.
Author:
James Payn
-
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Author:
Walter Pater
-
If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
Author:
John Passos
-
In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.
Author:
Sara Paretsky
-
I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.
Author:
Elaine Paige
-
I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Author:
Mary Oliver
-
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
Author:
Mary Oliver
-
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.
Author:
Sharon Olds
-
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
Author:
Sharon Olds
-
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.
Author:
John O'Hara
-
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.
Author:
Kenzaburo Oe
-
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
-
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
-
Writers never get a very good deal in Hollywood.
Author:
Richard O'Brien
-
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Author:
Kate O'Brien
-
Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
Author:
Edna O'Brien
-
Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.
Author:
Alden Nowlan
-
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.
Author:
Denis Norden
-
My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.
Author:
Larry Niven
-
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Author:
Howard Nemerov
-
Stargate by far is the top of the pile when it comes to Sci-Fi. The quality is great. They have really good writers, production design, lighting, wardrobe.
Author:
Corin Nemec
-
We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects. You can actually figure out before you work on something how much blood you will have to let emotionally.
Author:
Ajay Naidu
-
And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.
Author:
Len Murray
-
It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.
Author:
George Murray
-
When Ted Williams was here, inducted into the Hall of Fame 37 years ago, he said he must have earned it, because he didn't win it because of his friendship with the writers. I guess in that way, I'm proud to be in this company that way.
Author:
Eddie Murray
-
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
Author:
Paul Muldoon
-
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
Author:
Walter Mosley
-
I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
Author:
John Mortimer
-
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Author:
Toni Morrison
-
Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
Author:
Toni Morrison
-
Too many of these writers in the music papers, they are misunderstanding everything. The disco sound is not art or anything so serious.
Author:
Giorgio Moroder
-
I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Author:
Robert Morgan
-
Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.
Author:
Robert Morgan
-
Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
Author:
Robert Morgan
-
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Author:
Robert Morgan
-
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Author:
Robert Morgan
-
Together with script writers Syd green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series.
Author:
Eric Morecambe
-
Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Author:
Alberto Moravia
-
Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.
Author:
Daniel Moran
-
Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories.
Author:
Daniel Moran
-
When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.
Author:
Elizabeth Moon
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Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.
Author:
Mary Montagu
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I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that, I thought golf writers got up every morning, played a round of golf, had lunch, showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.
Author:
Phil Mickelson
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Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.
Author:
James Michener
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The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
Author:
James Michener
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Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.
Author:
John Metcalf
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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.
Author:
John Metcalf
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How that works is our first season was the year we had a threatened writers' strike, so what we did was that instead of doing 22 episodes, we did 30. We put 10 in the bank.
Author:
Christopher Meloni
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My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there are so many great Irish writers - because there is something mystical in the air. There's always this cloudy, moody sky and it's challenging.
Author:
Christopher Meloni
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Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.
Author:
Terry McMillan
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I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.
Author:
Donald McKay
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Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.
Author:
Roger McGough
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So, we come out to Los Angeles. And we met with every network. We met with show runners, directors, writers, everything. And what we had an idea for, they didn't like. And what they had an idea for, we didn't like. So, we went home.
Author:
Reba McEntire
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Some of the greatest writers in our industry can't get work.
Author:
Kent McCord
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I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start.
Author:
Anne McCaffrey
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I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale.
Author:
Anne McCaffrey
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Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.
Author:
Joyce Maynard
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Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Author:
Daphne Maurier
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The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
Author:
W. Maugham
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Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.
Author:
Murray Mann
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I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.
Author:
Barry Mann
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At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.
Author:
Margaret Mahy
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I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.
Author:
Margaret Mahy
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At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.
Author:
Margaret Mahy
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My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.
Author:
Margaret Mahy
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Our principal writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping regular education.
Author:
Hugh MacDiarmid
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The first year we actually did a lot of night shooting and the writers weren't even allowed on location.
Author:
James MacArthur
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One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
Author:
Yo-Yo Ma
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And I have to consider myself fortunate, because there are plenty of writers who spend most of a lifetime looking for that certain something without ever finding it.
Author:
Brian Lumley
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Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.
Author:
Brian Lumley
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Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.
Author:
F. Lucas
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You could name the great stars of the silent screen who were finished; the great directors gone; the great title writers who were washed up. But remember this, as long as you live: the producers didn't lose a man. They all made the switch. That's where the great talent is.
Author:
Ernst Lubitsch
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You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.
Author:
Nia Long
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I'm interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We're all victims and few of us are truly free.
Author:
David Lloyd
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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.
Author:
Penelope Lively
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We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master's degree program, and we want them - to expose them to everything.
Author:
James Lipton
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Author:
Sinclair Lewis
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Good writers are of necessity rare.
Author:
George Lewes
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I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.
Author:
Jonathan Lethem
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I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.
Author:
Jonathan Lethem
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I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.
Author:
John Legend
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I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.
Author:
Tanith Lee
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Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
Author:
Tanith Lee
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Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make.
Author:
Norman Lear
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But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.
Author:
Norman Lear
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There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small.
Author:
James Laughlin
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The prophets and the writers of the Psalms were clear that God was continuing to work in the universe and in all history. They declared that He had created the universe.
Author:
Kenneth Latourette
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A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Author:
Ring Lardner
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However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
Author:
Wally Lamb
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New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.
Author:
Tim LaHaye
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Home base is the support system where we have a culinary team, my own writers because of the shows and the books and stuff, we have a culinary team of about six people. Marketing, public relations, accounting and all that sort of stuff.
Author:
Emeril Lagasse
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If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.
Author:
Dean Koontz
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I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.
Author:
Edward Koch
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At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
Author:
Chuck Klosterman
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All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.
Author:
Ben Kingsley
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Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.
Author:
Larry King
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Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
Author:
Florence King
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The writers I respect the most had an undying commitment to a vision.
Author:
Jewel Kilcher
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Nothing spooky or terrible happened on set, but we were told to say it had. We were giving a press conference and the writers were going on about these terrible things that supposedly happened while we were filming.
Author:
Margot Kidder
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I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.
Author:
Thomas Keneally
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That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.
Author:
Jonathan Kellerman
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I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.
Author:
Philip Kaufman
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I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.
Author:
Paul Kane
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As for goals, I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.
Author:
Paul Kane
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Some writers would be kinder than others, I'm sure. Hopefully they might describe my techniques as a mixture of tried and tested formulas - if it aint broke don't fix it - and unexpected twists.
Author:
Paul Kane
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Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
Author:
Paul Kane
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It hurt me a great deal. It put a lot of pressure on me because I was at a young age and the writers around here and throughout the league starting comparing me to Cobb. It put a lot of pressure on me.
Author:
Al Kaline
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Writers speak stench.
Author:
Franz Kafka
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It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.
Author:
Norton Juster
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I do enjoy working with writers.
Author:
Neil Jordan
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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.
Author:
Erica Jong
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Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.
Author:
Jerry Jenkins
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I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.
Author:
Tahar Jelloun
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We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.
Author:
Tahar Jelloun
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
Author:
Tahar Jelloun
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I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
Author:
Guillermo Infante
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I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.
Author:
Guillermo Infante
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Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.
Author:
Guillermo Infante
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I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.
Author:
Guillermo Infante
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I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
Author:
Guillermo Infante
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I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.
Author:
Eric Idle
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Some scientists use TeX or LatEX but for most people Word is the thing that writers use these days.
Author:
Miguel Icaza
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The so-called feminist writers were disgusted with me. I did my thing, and so I guess by feminist standards I'm a feminist. That suits me fine.
Author:
Chrissie Hynde
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Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Author:
Aldous Huxley
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I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about.
Author:
Jeffrey Hunter
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I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.
Author:
Ian Hunter
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We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
Author:
Langston Hughes
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I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
Author:
Robert Howard
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It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.
Author:
Robert Howard
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I went on a long trip through South America with Prince Charles where I was the only journalist there - a couple of photographers but no other writers.
Author:
Anthony Holden
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I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?
Author:
Alice Hoffman
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My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
Author:
Howard Hodgkin
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I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.
Author:
Patricia Highsmith
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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.
Author:
Arthur Herzog
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Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists.
Author:
Jack Herer
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What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven't seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn't a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time.
Author:
Buck Henry
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If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Author:
Lillian Hellman
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They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Author:
Lillian Hellman
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There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.
Author:
Robert Heinlein
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Author:
Seamus Heaney
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I think for writers who write that kind of stuff, they want to make changes. Look at Kris Kristofferson and Dylan. I mean, whole generations come along liking that stuff and that's great.
Author:
Lee Hazlewood
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The writers have slowly taken the show, with subjects other gay shows have dived right into, slowly. It was over a year before Will even started to date.
Author:
Sean Hayes
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But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.
Author:
Sean Hayes
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Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion.
Author:
Teresa Hayden
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Sometimes writers say true things about the overall nature of publicity, promotion, and the publishing industry; but alas, not always.
Author:
Teresa Hayden
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Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.
Author:
Lorenz Hart
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Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.
Author:
Jim Harrison
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Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
Author:
Jim Harrison
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Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.
Author:
Harry Harrison
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It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice.
Author:
Paul Harris
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I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write.
Author:
Laurell Hamilton
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I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else.
Author:
Laurell Hamilton
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There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
Author:
Mark Haddon
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Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
Author:
Mark Haddon
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I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
Author:
Mark Haddon
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I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Author:
Marilyn Hacker
