Writers Quotes

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

Contrary to what many writers imply about the process, nobody forces a writer to sell his work to the film industry.

I met a bunch of comic-book writers at the Metropolis convention and there was such an interesting discussion about the story of 'Supergirl' and trying to get it right. It can be a challenge, because you don't want it to be the same as the Superman story.

It's also not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources.

Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.

I've probably had my day in the sun. I think I've influenced a lot of comic book writers.

In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it's so hard to be read.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

All writers are vampires.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.

I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

Like most struggling writers trying to get their scripts commissioned, I had to do something odd to pay the rent. So, aged 21, I started up my own small cheesecake company in Philadelphia.