A Quote by Bernard Malamud

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

Bernard Malamud

Quote Topics

Critical Everything Eye Highly Looking Spectator Writer

Quote Author

Bernard Malamud
American - Novelist
April 26, 1914 - March 18, 1986

If 'Spectator Business' works, we will continue this brand extension strategy and look at everything from 'Spectator Arts' to 'Spectator Style and Travel' or 'Spectator Connoisseur.'

Andrew Neil

I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

Annabelle Selldorf

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Raymond Carver

In a bird's eye view you tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worms eye view you don't have that advantage of looking at everything.

Muhammad Yunus

I enjoyed watching good-looking idiots looking at each other. A great spectator sport.

Jeff Lindsay

As a director you have to be at 30,000 ft objectively looking at everything, wondering if you're making the right objective, emotional, story, character choices. As the writer, while you're asking all of those same questions, you're also forced by the nature of what writing is to be looking at everything under a microscope. That's the difference between the two jobs.

Alex Kurtzman

In the highly unlikely event that the 'Telegraph' was to be sold again, then 'The Spectator' doesn't go with it.

Andrew Neil

Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.

Damon Galgut

Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.

Oliver Sacks

An actor's only perception is of their character, and they're looking at one piece. A writer is looking at the entire story. They're going to see things that the writer didn't see because they're only looking through their lens.

Julie Plec

I'm looking for a writer who doesn't know where the sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love, a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones who know her so well, the ones with the power to accuse and condemn in the blink of an eye. It's all right that she doesn't know what she's thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she's arrived.

Sy Safransky

I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.

Ma Jian

I have a partner, Danny Strong; he's an incredible writer and, really, my backbone. So when we don't see eye to eye, it's painful.

Lee Daniels

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman