All Quotes By Tag: Writers

“For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn’t tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. …It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can’t give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can’t help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.”

“Sculptors feel that somebody else is using their hands, that they couldn’t possibly be doing this.”

“Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told. It’s in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can’t trust anything they haven’t seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

“A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

“A novelist can’t be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)”

“A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren’t quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.”

“It was only after two years’ work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn’t realise I knew that I said, ‘I’m a writer now.’ The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That’s really what writing is—an intense form of thought.”

“If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.”

“What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.”

“Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writersmystics, painters, troubadoursfor they teach us to see the world through different eyes.”

“Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.”

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”

“If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.”