Writers Quotes

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

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.

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.

Together with script writers Syd green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series.

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon.

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

It's well known that actors are lousy writers.