A Quote by James T. Farrell

There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.

James T. Farrell

Quote Topics

Dead Good Kind Writer

Quote Author

James T. Farrell
American - Novelist
February 27, 1904 - August 22, 1979

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

Mario Vargas Llosa

When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that.

Rumaan Alam

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

Mamie Gummer

When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.

Greta Gerwig

When you're late in a fairy tale, people wind up dead. And not true-love's-kiss, glass-coffin-nap-time dead. Really dead, the kind of dead you don't recover from.

Mira Grant

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

Homer Hickam

I'm not the kind of writer that can write eight hours a day... I'm the kind of writer that the more time I have, the less efficient I am.

David Ebershoff

The government hates rap. That's why they don't arrest anybody that kills rappers! Only the good ones are dead, man! Only the good ones: Biggie dead, Tupac dead, Vanilla Ice still alive! They don't fill out a police report. They don't even have a chalk line when it's a dead rapper, they just take a piss around the body.

Chris Rock

The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.

Seamus Heaney

I never wanted to be a celebrity writer. I wanted to be a good writer. I'm still trying to be a good writer. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

Thomas McGuane

I never wanted to be "a writer"; I only ever aspired to be an science fiction writer. They'll tear that badge out of my cold dead hands.

Alastair Reynolds

Intelligence alone can't make a good writer and style alone can't make a good writer - that is, not a really important or significant writer - but the two things together make a really good writer.

Truman Capote

Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque. So you get that kind of shortfall between the actual experience of the writer and the things he's hungry to express and the voice itself.

George Saunders

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.