A Quote by John Braine

Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.

John Braine

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Being Harem Library Like Rather Writer

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John Braine
English - Novelist
April 13, 1922 - October 28, 1986

Being a screenwriter in Hollywood is like being a eunuch at an orgy. Worse, actually, at least the eunuch is allowed to watch.

Albert Brooks

A critic without a good eye is a eunuch in a harem.

Walter Darby Bannard

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

Howard Fast

But I'm more of a recluse when it comes down to being a writer and being a creative person rather than being a celebrity.

Denny Laine

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years ? whether it is being the writer or being the lover ? turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

Philip Roth

I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader.

Michael Scott

If anyone asks me whether I like being a popular writer, I ask them whether they think I'd rather be an unpopular writer.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

A man's library is a sort of harem.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are lots of similarities between being a writer and a lawyer: to tell a story to a jury, hold their attention, make them laugh, make them like you. But what makes being a barrister less satisfying than being a writer is, finally, that it's about what someone else wants you to say.

John Mortimer

Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.

Martin Heidegger

The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. You know, my fantasy of being a famous writer, and again there's a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

J. K. Rowling

I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.

Brian Aldiss

My mother's sobriety - that's when I found the theater, that's when I moved from being a basketball player to being a musician, to being an actor, to then being a writer.

Peter Hedges

I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

Geoff Dyer

'Rather You Than Me' just speaks for my natural instinct to survive, but it's also me being a writer, me being a poet - there's also a beautiful side to 'Rather You Than Me.'

Rick Ross

Being holy . . . does not mean being perfect but being whole; it does not mean being exceptionally religious or being religious at all; it means being liberated from religiosity and religious pietism of any sort; it does not mean being morally better, it meas being exemplary; it does not mean being godly, but rather being truly human.

William Stringfellow

A Quote by John Braine

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