Top 1200 Writers And Poets Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches.

I personally believe the role of poets as poets (which is something different from our obligations as citizens, community members, humans) is to write poems. I believe this because I am quite sure poetry can do something no other form or writing, or human activity, can, at least not in such a powerful and distilled and undeniable way. And that we need this type of thinking for our survival as individuals and as a species.

Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's not necessarily their rap.

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.

I think more talented writers should get involved in the industry, yes, of course. But that doesn't presuppose that those writers have to be novelists or screenwriters.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

Why are you uncomfortable with the supernaturalist worldview of the biblical writers? Evangelicals don't want to just say, "Well, the inspired writers were wrong about some of their beliefs about the spiritual world and its inhabitants." That really doesn't work in a confessional situation! So instead we come up with excuses and interpretations that allow us to remake the biblical writers in our own post-Enlightenment image. I understand that impulse, but it's not honest.

When I say God it is poetry and not theology. Nothing that any theologian has written about God has helped me much, but everything the poets have written about flowers and birds and skies and seas and saviors of the race, and God - whoever He may be - has at one time or another reached my soul!...The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted by my tears.

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.

Some of the old folk singers used to phrase things in an interesting way, and then, I got my style from seeing a lot of outdoor-type poets, who would recite their poetry. When you don't have a guitar, you recite things differently, and there used to be quite a few poets in the jazz clubs, who would recite with a different type of attitude.

[I have] my own view about [Bob] Dylan's Nobel prize. Which is, I'm firmly in the Nay camp. I do think the award is a category error, but that's not why. Not in itself. What bothers me is the perceived status of the categories. If pop lyricists were routinely considered for the prize as are authors and poets, I'd still think it mistaken, but I wouldn't much care. But I am quite certain that Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, for example, both at the very least Dylan's equals as writers, have never been in the running and never will be.

There are major writers who have written books [based on my research]. If one looks carefully at the copyright page, you'll see my name. Writers of the stature of Mailer and even bigger. All over the world.

Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.

I have a well-balanced show. It's 50/50 on men/women, and also African-American/white writers, it's the same thing. I have four African-American writers, and four non-African-American writers.

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.

It's fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn't very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.

All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

We have people say, 'There's not enough women writers.' I have a writers room that is almost nothing but women over at 'Grey's Anatomy.'

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

There are writers I return to no matter what I'm working on, writers like the South African J.M. Coetzee. He has an ability to make you feel that he is writing for you alone.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

Reality television is a scripted hyper-life that employs writers, but won't allow them to call themselves writers or join the union.

My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

All of my works are performance pieces, as is true for many writers of color, writers who have indigenous roots - because our basis is spoken word.

If you look at most womens writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writers description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. Theyre looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.

I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.

It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do.

I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed. There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers. And it's appropriate, because the writer is getting paid and the reader isn't.

I get to meet writers, and I love writers.

while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

I read continually and don't understand writers who say they don't read while working on a book. For a start, a book takes me about two years to write, so there's no way I am depriving myself of reading during that time. Another thing is that reading other writers is continually inspiring - reading great writers reminds you how hard you have to work.

I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.

As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with me, poets more excellent lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my country I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colors-of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here have a consciousness of superiority to many.

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It's important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.

My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

Writers' communities are very helpful to writers because it gives them a way to try out their stuff short of publication.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.

I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists.

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.

I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.

A lot of writers, probably because they're sensitive, which makes them want to be writers, have fears about their masculinity, so they overcompensate by having an interest in boxing and tough-guy things.

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.

I went to Havana, and I was like, "Wow, there's culture everywhere!" That was one thing that I did notice when I went to Cuba was that artists are paid to be artists, and poets are paid to be poets, and musicians are paid to be musicians by the government. The government - and I'm not saying that the Cuban government's perfect - but the government does place a value on culture.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

I think what makes you feel so connected with certain writers isn't a matter of autobiographical detail, but that the emotions are real. The way some writers are able to channel themselves through the form.