Great Writers Quotes

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

I'm not a great writer. I'm a great rewriter.

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.

Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be.

I'm not a great writer.

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

There is an interview given by [ Jean-Paul] Sartre in the USA where he is asked what the future of French literature is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future is [Albert] Camus.

I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

It's hard not to be enthusiastic when you like what you're doing and I love what I do. I love writing stories, I love coming up with ideas for new projects and I love the people I work with, because I work with great writers and artists and directors and actors.

Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.

I'm a strong believer that you have to have an equal opportunity to fail and to try things that are hard. I always tell my students, "Don't just take things that are easy for you. If you're really good at math, don't take just math. Take classes that make you write. If you're a really great writer, but bad at math, take math and make yourself work your way through it."

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer . . . if he can only . . . tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes.

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer.

The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.

When you're in a band with three writers, three great writers, you only get one third of the writer thing. So that's the whole reason that I did a solo career. And that's, you know, when I told Fleetwood Mac I was going to do that, they were of course terrified that I would do that record and then that I would quit.

I had no aspirations to become a landscape photographer at all. In fact it was portraiture that was my beginning, I suppose. I have always been a very keen walker, though, and I often took a camera with me on my walks. But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

I would just like to see hip-hop journalism in general take a step up and match the artistry. There have been great writers in music who are the caliber of artist as a writer as the people that they're covering.

There are many people writing songs. That is absolutely wonderful. Who knows, there may be some kid in diapers and he or she might succeed in capturing in a few dozen words what great writers have spent years trying to say. Just the right word in the right place with the right melody behind it and the right rhythm. It might get around the world inch by inch, and people realize that this world is in danger, that we're in danger. That's the way "This Land Is Your Land" got to be so well known.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.

An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.

I have to say that The Simpsons comes from a huge number of great writers headed by Al Jean, the show-runner, and the work that they do is really fantastic. It's a blast just to sit around with them in the writers' room and listen to all the filthy jokes that will never get on the air.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.