“They're hardly given to conventional writers, and a writer like myself is hardly given a knighthood.”

Interview with Wilson Harris (2010) on being Knighted at Queen Elizabeth II Birthday Honours

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Wilson Harris15

Guyanese writer 1921–2018

Renata Adler (1938) American author, journalist and film critic

Source: Speedboat

“I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

The Twinkling of an Eye: My Life as an Englishman (1998) Unsourced variant: "Why had I become a writer in the first place? Because I wasn't fit for society; I didn't fit into the system."

“All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination. For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

Source: The Man Without Qualities

“Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel... not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?"”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

National Observer (6 February 1967)

“Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"Inner Landscape : Interview with J.G. Ballard" by Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton, in Friends No. 17 (30 October 1970) http://www.jgballard.ca/media/1970_oct_friends_magazine.html; also quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews <br class="br">Context: A hundred years ago one has the impression that people had made a clear distinction between the outer world of work and of agriculture, commerce and social relationships — which was real — and the inner world of their own minds, day-dreams and hopes. Fiction on the one hand; reality on the other. This reality which surrounded individuals, the writer's role of inventing a fiction that encapsulated various experiences going on in the real world and dramatising them in fictional form, worked. Now the whole situation has been reversed. The exterior landscapes of the seventies are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising, mass merchandising… politics conducted as advertising. It is very difficult for the writer.<br>Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.