A Quote by Edward Abbey

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

Edward Abbey

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Any Away Beyond Critic Foreign Good Good Writer Hack Lives Powers Rail Safely Sea Society Writer

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.

Chuck Klosterman

I mean any fool can hurl themselves at a climb that is beyond their abilities to safely negotiate. You may get away with such an approach nine times, but the tenth time you don't come back.

Jeff Lowe

Beyond highways and roads, we need more money for mass transit, intercity passenger rail and freight rail. We have a long way to go to bridge the funding gaps.

Bill Lipinski

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.

Edward Albee

It is necessary a writing critic should understand how to write. And though every writer is not bound to show himself in the capacity of critic, every writing critic is bound to show himself capable of being a writer; for if he be apparently impotent in this latter kind, he is to be denied all title or character in the other.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

Jim Bishop

There are good and bad critics like good or bad artists. A good critic says why they didn't like it. A bad critic gives it away that they don't like you as a person. I quite like that as well, because it means that I've won.

Ricky Gervais

Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.

Harlan Ellison

It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.

Edmund White

An elected government making huge changes with the consent of its people, is being undermined by concentrated powers in unregulated markets-powers which go beyond those of any individual government.

George Papandreou

To say 'well done'to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.

Phillips Brooks

To say, 'well done' to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.

Phillips Brooks

Criticism ultimately at some degree is about the writer and not the subject. It's very easy if everybody else says, "He's a genius," to echo that, but then you're not functioning as a critic or as a writer in any meaningful way. You've got to take the risk of being wrong.

Gary Giddins

If the end be clearly comprehended within any of the specified powers, and if the measure have an obvious relation to that end, and is not forbidden by any particular provision of the Constitution, it may safely be deemed to come within the compass of the national authority.

Alexander Hamilton

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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