A Quote by Derrick Bell

I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I'm envious of the level of attention they generate.

Derrick Bell

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Alice Attention Envious Fiction Fiction Writer Fiction Writers Generate Go Level Like Walker Writers

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Derrick Bell
American - Educator
November 6, 1930 - October 5, 2011

Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.

Dee Rees

I suppose most writers are following Twain's advice to tackle what they know, and my own readings habits drew me to writers who seemed to be writing honestly from their own experiences, whether they presented it in the guise of fiction or not.

Kevin Keck

Writers like Twain, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, Alice Walker, so many others that I read coming up as a writer, that helped form my ideas of what it means to be American - and an American writer. I'm always in conversation with them.

Micah Perks

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

Lynn Nottage

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

Edward Hirsch

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

Ethan Canin

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Alain de Botton

Alice Walker's words have such rhythm and scream music.

Angela Robinson

There's a long relationship between science fiction and the 'novel of ideas,' and I think writers of science fiction are able to draw on that tradition to take risks, to constantly raise the level of their ambition.

Katie Kitamura

I love doing the readings. The readings are the fun bits... The readings are probably the things that actually keep me going on these. If I couldn't do the readings, I wouldn't do the [signing] tours. I get to stand up there and read to a bunch of adults who in many cases nobody's read to in years, since they were about five. They just squat on the floor. That's enormously enjoyable.

Neil Gaiman

Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

Martin Rees

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

Edward Hirsch

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Nancy Kress

[On writing to Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple:] I told her I would play a Venetian blind, dirt on the floor, anything.

Whoopi Goldberg

I think all of us begin as writers. I wanted to be a writer from the time I as eight, long before I heard of jazz. The question is, once you have that obsession, what is your subject going to be and you often don't know for some time. It might become fiction, it might be non-fiction, and if it's non-fiction it can go in any number of directions.

Gary Giddins

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.

Theodore Sturgeon

A Quote by Derrick Bell

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