“Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.”
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Jean Little1
Canadian children's writer 1932Related quotes
Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) Cuban poet/novelist/playwright
Source: On a writer’s responsibility in “The Literature of Uprootedness: An Interview with Reinaldo Arenas” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-literature-of-uprootedness-an-interview-with-reinaldo-arenas in The New Yorker (2013 Dec 5)
“The only true exile is the writer who lives in his own country.”
Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer
“Promoting reading is a moral responsibility of writers.”
José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor
Source: Trujillo, Estrella. Exclusive cultural interview. https://www.peruinforma.com/entrevista-cultural-al-escritor-chileno-jose-baroja/
Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer
Introduction to Shatterday (1980), p. 2
Context: I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.
Renata Adler (1938) American author, journalist and film critic
Source: Speedboat
“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) 1922-2008 French agricultural engineer, filmmaker and writer