Quotes about writer
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“The series of events leading up to the formation of the biblical community and its religion apparently began unexpectedly. Moses killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating one of the slaves. It is difficult to imagine this being a fictional invention, especially since the biblical writers never chose to comment on this noteworthy aspect of the protagonist’s dark past. When Moses later tried to intervene between two quarreling slaves, one of them responded, “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2:11-15). Is the monopoly of force — the ability to coerce other human beings — truly the ultimate basis of social authority? If it seems undesirable to ground social authority on something that essentially boils down to the superior ability to commit murder, then what is the alternative?”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Ancient Israel’s Faith and History: An Introduction the Bible in Context (2001)

Religion, Imagination, Communication, Past

“Then, above all, the English people have a curious sense of humour, rather than wit. Humour comes from the heart; wit comes from the brain. We can laugh at ourselves. Do you remember what Ruskin said? "The English laugh is the purest and truest in the metals that can be minted," and indeed, only Heaven can know what the country owes to it. Well, laughter is one of the best things that God has given us, and with hearty laughter neither malice nor indecency can exist. And of all men who have shown us what that laughter can mean, none was like Dickens, every one of whose characters is English to the marrow; and if I might mention a living writer, I think the truest Englishmen are found in Mr. Priestley's novels.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 13.
1933

Men, God, People, Thinking

“I'm a writer who plays the piano. As I write, I find new things I like. I make them into what I call principles, and they become part of my playing vocabulary. That's the secret of what you get from composing. You get to discover things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Much like a speech pattern, your improvisation patterns can get stale if you don't keep building your vocabulary. Each time you re voice something, you change the sound. When you do this enough, you get used to those sounds, and they start to come out as you play. You end up using voicings that aren't common, which gives you an auditory identity.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

As quoted in "Voicing With a Heart"

Secret, Change, Time, Parting

“The real writers are tenacious creatures, and they found a way long before there were writers workshops and creative writing courses in the universities. In the absence of formal frameworks, personal initiatives and informal frameworks become more important.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh (1968) Irish writer

Interview by Tom Vowler (2010-13)

Way, Universe, Personality

“Here then (belove reader) thou hast this work devided into two treatises, the first is the said introduction and reasoning, for investigation of the true sense of every cheife Theological tearme and date contained in the Revelation, whereby, not onely is it opened, explained and interpreted, but also that same explanation and interpretation is proved, confirmed and demonstrated, by evidente proofe and coherence of scriptures, agreeable with the event of histories. The seconde is, the principall treatise, in which the whole Apocalyps, Chapter by chapter, Verse by verse, and Sentence by sentence, is both Paraphrastically expounded and Historically applyed. …And because this whole work of Revelation concerneth most the discoverie of the Antichristian and Papisticall kingdome, I have therefore (for removing of all suspition) in al histories and prophane matters, taken my authorities and cited my places either out of Ethnick auctors, or then papistical writers, whose testimonies by no reason can be refuted against themselves. But in matters of divinitie, doctrine & interpretation of mysteries (leaving all opinions of men) I take me onely to the interpretation and discoverie thereof, by coherence of scripture, and godly reasons following thereupon; which also not only no Papist, but even no Christian may justly refuse. And forasmuch as our scripturs herein are of two fortes, the one our ordinary text, the other extraordinary citations; In our ordinary text, I follow not altogether the vulgar English translation, but the best learned in the Greek tong, so that (for satisfying the Papists) I differ nothing from their vulgar text of S. Jerome, as they cal it, except is such places, where I prove by good reasons, that hee differeth from the Original Greek. In the extraordinary texts of other scriptures cited by me, I followe ever Jeromes latine translation, where any controverse stands betwixt us and the Papists, and that moveth me in divers places to insert his very latine text, for their cause, with the just English thereof, for supply of the unlearned.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593)

Men, History, Sense, Learning

“Philosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous… So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter I, Sec. 7

Knowledge, Problem, Training

“Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets—and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Recent Poetry”, p. 225
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

People, World, Time

“This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just "What if…" It's "My God; what if…"”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

In frenzy and hysteria.
Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)

Love, God, Reading

“When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: “Nemo” or “no one”; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Books, Age, World, Thinking

“Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life — observable reality — and the faculty of the imagination — the power of projection into the hidden — to make stories.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Life, Death, Feeling, Imagination

“I am a person always full of contradictions… It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

As quoted in "Living legend : Ba Jin" in News Guangdong (26 November 2003) http://www.newsgd.com/culture/art/200311260025.htm

Personality

“On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Rider Haggard: Still Riding", p. 29
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

“Somebody said that Bertolt Brecht [German socialist writer of political theater] wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here [in America] all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 26

Way, Communication, Thinking

“Becoming more callous and hardened when God thunders verbally from heaven, they obstinately persist in their rebellion. It is only when actually smitten by his hand that they are forced, whether they will or not, to fear. This fear the sacred writers term servile, and oppose to the free and voluntary fear which becomes sons.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 27, p. 480
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God, Fear

“Some fortunate, prolific writers seem to be able, efficiently, to keep several projects going at once; it appears I am not one of them.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Geek Speak Magazine Interview (2010)

Appearance

“We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

6 April 1856 (p. 312)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Way, Imagination, Intelligence

“If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write “teacher.” I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. [Pause. ] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes — or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

Thinking, Teachers, Personality

“Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else—only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that's what interests me: the strangeness of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas … that seem to have been with us from long before the stories of them happened. The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.”

Russell Hoban (1925–2011) American British novelist, children's writer and illustrator

The Moment Under the Moment (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), Foreword

Life, Death, Way, Idea

“The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech — it is a gift from heart to heart.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Miss Jewett"
Not Under Forty (1936)

Life, World, Way, Feeling

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life, Children, Books, Youth

“The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

Children, People, Girl, Boy

“First one should write no more or no less letters than the sound of the word requires. Second, one should write as one speaks and not try to pay attention to the style of other writers, particularly academicians.”

Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651–1689) German poet and mystic

Preface to Lehrreicher Geschicht-Herold
Other Quotes

“Of all kind of authors there are none I despise more than compilers, who search every where for shreds of other men's works, which they join to their own, like so many pieces of green turf in a garden: they are not at all superior to compositors in a printing house, who range the types, which, collected together, make a book, towards which they contribute nothing but the labours of the hand. I would have original writers respected, and it seems to me a kind of profanation to take those pieces from the sanctuary in which they reside, and to expose them to a contempt they do not deserve. When a man hath nothing new to say, why does not he hold his tongue? What business have we with this double employment?”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

No. 66.
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

Men, Books, Search, Business

“The tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the US is a wonderful allegory for new racism. Every year, the National Turkey Federation presents the US president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press.

That's how new racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park.
The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically, they're for the pot. But the fortunate fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the World Trade Organisation - so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

From a speech http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/569/569p12.htm given at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, 16 January 2004 Speeches

Life, Children, World, School

“The thing I liked about writing about food when I started it was that I felt I was writing about food in a different way. Not like a food writer.”

Nigella Lawson (1960) British food writer, journalist and broadcaster

As quoted in "Reality bites" by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,784535,00.html (2 September 2002)

Food, Way

“It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers… Dan Brown. Now Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." …and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died a painful death on the large green table… it was sad".”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 1 Episode 1: "Toilet Books"

Death, Pain, World, Sadness

“[M]any of us came… through a tradition in Western writing that harkens back to and Richard White may have made environmental history "the coolest history around"… but they didn't invent it…. For many writers in the twentieth century, from Webb to the 1937 Committee on the Future of the Great Plains to Frank and Deborah Popper, the Great Plains are the ultimate proving ground of environmentalism's doomsday predictions for the Modernist experiment in a massively altered landscape.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

History, Future

“Pay attention. As a summation of all that I have had to say as a writer, I would settle for that. And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I would settle for that too.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

Faith, Search

“The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.””

Sarah Bakewell book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 37.

“The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, "open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world."”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from official website http://www.whynot-world.com

World

“Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding places in a voluminous writer.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 124 (23 July 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

“I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

'The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo' by Gerald Howard, The Hungry Mind Review, #47 , 1997

“I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Love, Feeling, Quotes

“Another great writer who led me on It this stage was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. I had read all his novels but had never been able to understand why he had been honoured as a rishi. I myself was a novelist and had already written several humane stories. I thought that a novelist dealt with the dimensions of human character and mapped the heights it could scale and the depths to which it could sink. Why should we foist the title of a rishi on this poor fellow? That way rishis will be available a dime a dozen. My doubts about Bankim Chandra being a rishi were removed when I read the second volume of his Collected Works in Bengali. His insights into the innermost core of Hindu culture were a revelation. His Ramayaner Alochona made me see the monstrosities of modern Indology, more than ever before. I immediately translated this masterpiece into Hindi.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

Way, Understanding, Reading

“It was Italian playwright and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano who first spoke to Fellini of Fernando Pessoa during their collaboration on I Vitelloni (1953). Fellini claimed, however, that it was not until he lunched with Anthony Burgess in the mid 1970s (when the British writer owned a country house in Bracciano north of Rome) that he began reading the Portuguese poet in earnest. This is not to suggest that Pessoa influenced Fellini in any direct way but simply to note a genial coincidence embedded within two autobiographical masterpieces. The first quotation is from Pessoa’s O Livro do desassossego: ‘These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.’ The second is from Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) during the crucial night scene at the base of the scaffolding when Guido confesses to Rosella, “I have really nothing to say in my film. But I want to say it anyway.” Suddenly, the disparate obsessions of these two great Mediterranean minds seem to fold into one another, if only for an instant, like the sounds of vibrating wires touched simultaneously. Whatever the ultimate significance may be, it amuses me to think that textual coincidences of this nature are proof of the brotherhood of artists.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini and Fernando Pessoa
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

Way, Nature, Thinking, Reading

“"Writer's block" is just another word for video games. If you want to be a writer, get writing, you lazy bastards.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

MySpace blog, 09 April 2007

Game

“Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

War, Religion, Art, Way

“As a fantasy writer, he was not highly regarded (“one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground,” “so derivative that the reader loses track of who he’s ripping off,” “to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements”).”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Beauty, Hope, Light

“There is one hit of mine which will not stay in the official records, but which I believe to be the longest clout ever made off a major league pitcher. At least some of the veteran sport writers told me they never saw such a wallop. The Yanks were playing an exhibition game with the Brooklyn Nationals at Jacksonville, Fla., in April, 1920. Al Mamaux was pitching for Brooklyn. In the first inning, the first ball he sent me was a nice, fast one, a little lower than my waist, straight across the heart of the plate. It was the kind I murder, and I swung to kill it. The last time we saw the ball it was swinging its way over the 10-foot outfield fence of Southside Park and going like a shot. The ball cleared the fence by at least 75 feet. Let's say the total distance traveled was 500 feet: the fence was 423 feet from the plate. If such a hit had been made at the Polo Grounds, I guess the ball would have come pretty close to the top of the screen in the centerfield bleachers.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

In "Wherein Babe Tells of Some Longish Swats" http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1920/08/15/page/18/article/wherein-babe-tells-of-some-longish-swats by Ruth (as told to Pegler), in The Chicago Tribune (August 15, 1920); reprinted as "The Longest Hit in Baseball" https://books.google.com/books?id=SAAlxi-0EZYC&pg=PA39&dq=%22There+is+one+hit+of+mine%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjngMzRjbnQAhXDYyYKHe-JCCMQ6AEIFDAA#v=onepage&q=%22There%20is%20one%20hit%20of%20mine%22&f=false2 in Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball, p. 39

Way, Travel, Game, Sport

“The more consistently Austrian School an economist is, the better a writer he will be.”

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) American economist of the Austrian School, libertarian political theorist, and historian

As quoted in "An intellectual Autobiography" by Bryan Kaplan, in I Chose Liberty : Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (2010) edited by Walter Block, p. 75.

School

“Now turning to Writers in general. The urge to write is analysed as 50% Ambition, 45% Vanity and 5% something to say. This is rather drastic and later revised by a famous Author as 80% earning a living, 10% Vanity and 10% something to say. Though both may not be acceptable to all, yet using them as norms, one can classify to some extent the written effusions one reads. William Faulkner says he writes what people will believe and for that they will pay, as even a Writer has to make money.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Writers

Money, People, Reading

“I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. It's the only way of learning how to write a story.”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

Nov. 26th: Writing Advice (And Notes on Surnameless Tiffany) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gf69J1Go98&feature=channel YouTube

Way, Thinking, Learning, Reading

“Books of the avant-garde either establish themselves as books of lasting value, or they slip from the rear guard into the discard, and I believe the writers I mentioned have not proven trivial.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Books

“I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.”

Philip Roth book Deception

Deception: A Novel (1990)

Life, World

“For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.”

John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–1890) Irish-born poet and novelist

Quoted in Roche, James Jeffrey (1891). Life of John Boyle O'Reilly, together with his complete poems and speeches edited by Mrs John Boyle O'Reilly. New York. p 195.

Freedom, Time

“Vyasa wrote the first 40,000 verses and this book was named Jaya. Afterwards other writers added more stories and it became known as Bharata. Later still more additions were made until the composition became the Mahabharata as we know it today…. We believe that Veds Vyasa was one person and that he alone composed the entire Mahabharata consisting of 100,000 verses, it is the world’s largest epic in existence today and an encyclopedia of knowledge.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

Swami Tejomayananada, in p. 139.
Sources, Hindu Culture, An Introduction

Books, World, Knowledge, Personality

“The actual manufacture of material into a specific product is a sort of digestive process which must have a functioning organization purposed to meet the required ends, just as the human body has, and it is governed by similar conditions. It must also be directed by a specific intelligence and must have internal and external avenues of correspondence to keep it alive; and, like a living organism, must adhere to the eternal economy of things and show a profit by its activities or it cannot progress.
To exemplify this in a simple way, the writer has laid out Figure I, showing the prime elements composing the anatomy of an industrial body. One does not have to draw on the imagination very far to make a comparison of this anatomy with that of man. It has its mind, will power, and brain to direct it, as indicated by the stockholders, directors and executive officers, a heart which keeps in flow the circulating medium internally; and avenues of correspondence with the outside world which furnish to it the very elements of existence.
This chart shows first, that the stockholders are simply elements belonging to the general public who have made an investment for some specific purpose; second, that immediately after this, the election of directors sets into action the first internal factor in the body, which is then divided into different functioning powers by the election of executive officers.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Organizing a factory (1905), p. 24

World, Way, Imagination, Intelligence

“This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

Feeling

“The kindergarten essay got into that underground press we all belong to where something just sort of has a life of its own and moves around and it gets on refrigerators and in the work place and people copy it… I was a minister in the Unitarian church at the time and teaching and I was ready to stop that and do the next phase of my life. So I had quit both those jobs and I was all set up with my studio in Seattle when this other horse came riding by … I'm not a great writer and I'll never get the Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer Prize but I've won the refrigerator door award. And you don't see Faulkner on people's refrigerator.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Robert Fulghum : Philosopher King

Life, People, Time, Horse

“Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

The Bataille Reader (1997), p. 340

Life, World, Dreams, Art

“We have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935), p. 38

“A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Dead

“It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

Understanding

“There’s a lot of people sitting around in rooms discussing how to make it happen as opposed to just, like, doing it — asking: ‘Do you have any 45-year-old-woman friends who you think are really talented who could submit an application to us?’ ‘Do you have any black friends who are great writers who haven’t had a shot.”

Samantha Bee (1969) Canadian comedic actress and author

"Smirking in the Boys’ Room" https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/samantha-bee-full-frontal-c-v-r.html, Rebecca Traister, The Cut, Jan 2016

People, Thinking

“Adam Smith, and other able writers to whom I have alluded, not having viewed correctly the principles of rent, have, it appears to me, overlooked many important truths, which can only be discovered after the subject of rent is thoroughly understood.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Original Preface, p. 1
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition)

Truth, Appearance

“Write her a poem, spill your heart to her in sweet cadences; but I didn't know how to write poetry. It was love and dove with me, bad rhymes, blundering sentiment. Oh Christ in Heaven, I'm no writer: I can't even put down a little quatrain. I'm no good in this world. I stood at the window and waved my hands at the sky; no good at all, just a cheap fake; neither writer nor lover; neither fish nor fowl.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love, World, Lovers, Fish

“Ron Sirak, a golf writer and friend, was quoted as saying, "Annika is no longer a female golfer. She's a golfer." That's truly all I ever aspired to be.”

Annika Sörenstam (1970) Swedish golfer

End of World Golf Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech - October 2003 http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=15370

Quotes

“Lenin’ s article of 1905, "Party Organization and Party Literature", was used for decades, and is still used, to justify ideologically the enslavement of the written word in Russia. It has been argued that it refers only to political literature, but this is not so: it relates to every kind of writing. It contains the words: "Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘ a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class" (Works, vol. 10, p. 45). For the benefit of "hysterical intellectuals" who deplore this seemingly bureaucratic attitude, Lenin explains that there can be no mechanical levelling in the field of literature; there must be room for personal initiative, imagination, etc.; none the less, literary work must be part of the party’ s work and controlled by the party. This, of course, was written during the fight for "hourgeois democracy", on the assumption that Russia would in due course enjoy freedom of speech but that literary members of the party would have to display party-mindedness in their writings; as in other cases, the obligation would become general when the party controlled the apparatus of state coercion.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 515
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Democracy, Imagination, Literature, Freedom

“We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side.
One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. … Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i. e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness.
Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. … The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo (19 March 1922) http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/ae2bkhun.html Variant translation: It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables. … I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. As translated in The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archive (1996) edited by Richard Pipes, pp. 152-4 1920s

People, Way, Mood, Thinking

“Most writers, in my opinion, are dysfunctional derelicts.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20000205/ai_n14287081
On the media

“A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Life, Lie

“I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Quoted in George Jean Nathan The World of George Jean Nathan (1952) p. 252.

“For the first time in television a writer will have the opportunity to let his imagination take him where ever he wants to. The sky is no longer the limit.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Rod Serling: American Masters.
Other

Imagination, Time

“I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books... But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Books

“Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 29
Novum Organum (1620), Book II

Religion, Nature, Dependency

“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Religion, Smile

“In the course of the fifteenth century, the sexagesimal division of the radius, in terms of which cords and goniometrical line-segments were expressed, was generally superseded, though not immediately replaced, by a decimal system of positional notation. Instead, mathematicians sought to avoid fractions by taking the Radius equal to a number of units of length of the form {\displaystyle 10^{n}} {\displaystyle 10^{n}}…The first to apply this method was the German astronomer Regiomontanus… the second half of the sixteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth century… observed of a gradual development of this method of Regiomontanus into a complete system of decimal positional fractions. Yet none of the steps taken by… writers is comparable in importance and scope with the progress achieved by Stevin in his De Thiende.”

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian

Source: Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600, 1970, p. 17-18

“In 1663 Spinoza published the only work to which he ever set his name… He had prepared a summary of the second part of Descartes' 'Principles of Philosophy' for the use of a pupil… Certain of Spinoza's friends became curious about this manual and desired him to treat the first part of Descartes' work also in the same manner. This was done within a fortnight and Spinoza was then urged to publish the book, which he readily agreed to do upon condition that one of his friends would revise the language and write a preface explaining that the author did not agree with all the Cartesian doctrine… The contents… [included] an appendix of 'Metaphysical Reflections,' professedly written from a Cartesian point of view, but often giving significant hints of the author's real divergence from Descartes….'On this opportunity,' he writes to Oldenburg, 'we may find some persons holding the highest places in my country… who will be anxious to see those other writings which I acknowledge for my own, and will therefore take such order that I can give them to the world without danger of any inconvenience. If it so happens, I doubt not that I shall soon publish something; if not, I will rather hold my peace than thrust my opinions upon men against the will of my country and make enemies of them.'… The book on Descartes excited considerable attention and interest, but the untoward course of public events in succeeding years was unfavourable to a liberal policy, and deprived Spinoza of the support for which he had looked….
If Spinoza had ever been a disciple of Descartes, he had completely ceased to be so… He did not suppose the geometrical form of statement and argument to be an infallible method of arriving at philosophical truth; for in this work he made use of it to set forth opinions with which he himself did not agree, and proofs with which he was not satisfied. We do not know to what extent Spinoza's manual was accepted or taken into use by Cartesians, but its accuracy as an exposition of Descartes is beyond question. One of the many perverse criticisms made on Spinoza by modern writers is that he did not understand the fundamental proposition cogito ergo sum. In fact he gives precisely the same explanation of it that is given by Descartes himself in the Meditations.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

p, 125
Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (1880)

Men, Truth, Books, World

“He taught himself to write, retyping books by writers he admired: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner… the usual heavyweights. He said he wanted to get inside the rhythm of their language and find his own stlye.”

William McKeen (1954) American academic

Preface, The End, p. xv
Outlaw Journalist (2008)

Books

“If you understand comedy, you understand life. Drama, death, tragedy – everybody has these. But with humour you've got all these, and the antidote. You have found the answer. It doesn't follow that because you are a good comedy writer, you're a happy fellow. I've got one of the most miserable faces in the world. I am only happy when I am working. If I'm not working, I get screwed up because my time is going, my life is slipping by.”

Eric Sykes (1923–2012) English actor and director

Quoted in The Guardian, Wednesday 4 July 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jul/04/eric-sykes

Life, Death, Happiness, World

“For some reason the creation was called a rhedosaurus, and although I can't remember where this name came from, I suspect Hal Chester or one of the writers coined it. Over the years, people have suggested that the first two letters relate to the initials of a certain animator. I have no comment.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 49

People, Animals

“Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or overpraised their greatest mediaeval poet, it is certain that we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach qualities, which, in the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in romantic charm.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

George Saintsbury The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897) p. 251.
Criticism

Literature

“Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.”

Edna O'Brien (1930) Novelist, memoirist, biographer, playwright, poet and short story writer

Interviewed in Vogue, April 1985

Soul

“As a writer you will know that one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is, a character's told 'you've got three months to live,' and who would you kill? I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do…) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

"The Long Goodbye," The Guardian (6 April 1994); the quote is from Potter's final television interview with Melvyn Bragg (5 April 1994)

Life, Reality, Time, Parting

“For twenty years I have been a writer and never before have I been in a milieu where every consideration came before literary consideration. And the opinion of anybody — minor actor, money accountant or baggage man — weighed equally or more heavily than that of the author. My disgust is like a cap of fire bearing down on my head. Why would an author with any pride submit to the impertinences of theatre people?”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Diary, during the production of Love and Libel (1960).

Money, People

“Quoting an unnamed writer: "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commandments of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me', answered my God. 'I do, I do," I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or… to wait until I should be satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter?… Since then I have had direct answers to prayer — so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture III, "The Reality of the Unseen"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Love, God, Happiness, Religion

“p>The inherent contradictions and binds men find themselves in in trying to become less macho in their relationship with a woman were poignantly expressed in a letter written by a young man to a New York newspaper in response to an article that addressed itself to a question posed by a woman writer—whether women would be able to think of a non-macho man as sexy. The letter writer wrote:I am by nature a gentle and non-aggressive 27-year-old man who often finds women turned off sexually by my tenderness and non-macho view of the world. I have come to realize that for all their talk, a lot of women still want the hairy, sexy, war-mongering, aggressive machoman of their dreams. So after several fruitless years as a gentle poet-man, I now turn myself into a heavy machismo when I go out with a woman. It works. I open the doors, I order the food and drinks, I decide which movie or play we will see. I keep my shirt unbuttoned down past my nipples and wear a gold chain around my neck with a carved elephant tusk medallion, and if the relationship is not working out, I make the first move and tell my companion that I'm sorry but we're through.The sad thing about all this is that it works.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

After all those years of being naturally sensitive and gentle, and now I've got to turn myself inside out just to appear sexy. It's fun and it's nice, but I do wish I could just be myself again.</blockquote>
Who Is the Victim? Who Is the Oppressor?, pp. 165–166
The New Male (1979)

Women, Men, War, World

“I don't feel the need to be a role model, it's just something that's been thrust upon me. Teachers and a lot of Asian-American organizations, for example, say to me, "We need you to come and speak to us because you're a role model."… Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. Someone who writes fiction is not necessarily writing a depiction of any generalized group, they're writing a very specific story.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

SALON Interview (1995)

Feeling, Teachers

“In the selection of papers for this volume, two problems have arisen, namely what constitutes systems thinking and what systems thinking is relevant to the thinking required for organizational management. The first problem is obviously critical. Unless there were a meaningful answer there would be no sense in producing a volume of readings in systems thinking in any subject. A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Frederick Edmund Emery (ed.) (1969) Systems thinking: selected readings Penguin, p. 7: Beginning of editorial by Fred Emery.

Way, Problem, Thinking, Sense

“One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man…It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

H. G. Wells The Outline of History (1920) p. vii.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

Books, History, Reading

“I speak "with absolute certainty" only so far as my own personal belief is concerned. Those who have not the same warrant for their belief as I have, would be very credulous and foolish to accept it on blind faith. Nor does the writer believe any more than her correspondent and his friends in any "authority" let alone "divine revelation!"”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) occult writer

Collected Writings, vol. XI, p. 466 (October, 1889) http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v11/y1889_065.htm

Faith, Personality

“Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.”

Truman Capote (1924–1984) American author

From a 1957 interview
Truman Capote: Conversations (1987)

Way, Imagination, Nature, Silence

“A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist — nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

Letter to Corona Machemer (11 June 1975)

World, Time

“A true scholarship would examine, and then either accept or reject, with good reason, any new theory which challenges a generally accepted theory admitted to be full of sharp anomalies. However, this has not been the attitude of world scholarship towards our earlier book. The general attitude has been as follows: there is a school of crank scholarship in India which is out to prove, by hook or by crook, that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages; and the writers of this school deserve to be firmly put in their place. And the best method of doing this is by tarring all scholars who support, or even appear to support, an Indian homeland theory, with one brush; and then pointing out particularly untenable propositions made by one or the other of the scholars so branded together, to prove that all the scholars so named belong to one single school of irrational scholarship.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Shrikant Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, 2000.
The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 9 : Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship

Books, World, School, Family

“There are writers who exist to confirm people's feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That's the opposite to what I do. I'm presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood.”

Nicola Barker (1966) English novelist

Interview in The Observer http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2067715,00.html 29 April 2007

Hostility, People, Feeling

“As we have seen, the explicit part of the circular issued by the West Bengal government in 1989 in effect was that there must be no negative reference to Islamic rule in India. Although these were the very things which contemporary Islamic writers had celebrated, there must be no reference to the destruction of the temples by Muslim rulers, to the forcible conversion of Hindus, to the numerous other disabilities which were placed on the Hindu population. Along with the circular, the passages which had to be removed were listed and substitute passages were specified. The passages which were ordered to be deleted contained, if anything, a gross understatement of the facts. On the other hand, passages which were sought to be inserted contained total falsehoods: that by paying jizyah Hindus could lead ‘normal lives’ under an Islamic ruler like Alauddin Khalji! A closer study of the textbooks which are today being used under the authority of the West Bengal government shows a much more comprehensive, a much deeper design than that of merely erasing the cruelties of Islamic rule.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Study, Parting

“These women, like writers, have no time clocks to punch, no waiting boss. I write in the morning before teaching, and neither these women nor I care about the morning commuter traffic. There is no place we have to be. We already are where we have to be, facing ourselves. Both of us, without the prodding of a paycheck or the loss of a job, face only time itself, and our responsibility to use it as best we can.”

Andre Dubus (1936–1999) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

Of Robin Hood and Womanhood.
Broken Vessels (1991)

Women, Loss, Time, Waiting

“I’m a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.”

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore

Draft of a preface in “Notebook 16”; Quoted in The Collected Works of J.M. Synge, vol. 1, Introduction.

Reading

“Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw his Presidency as a struggle over narrative.”

George Packer (1960) American journalist and writer

“He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words… he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature… Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

On the prose of William S. Burroughs in Here to Go: Planet R-101 (Interviews with Terry Wilson),Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 159.

Literature

“The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 7, Usage, p. 45.

Dead

“When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Truth, Hope, Thinking, Change

“Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion.”

Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) British writer

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1973] 1975) vol. 1, p. 337.
Criticism

“I see in painters prose writers and poets. Rhyme, measure, and the turning of verses, which is indispensable and which gives them so much vigor, are analogous to the hidden symmetry, to the equilibrium at once wise and inspired, which governs the meeting or separation of lines and spaces, the echoes of color, etc….. but the beauty of verse does not consist of exactitude in obeying rules... It resides in a thousand secret harmonies and conventions which make up the power of poetry and which go straight to the imagination; in just the same way the happy choice of forms and the right understanding of their relationship act on the imagination in the art of painting.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 19 September 1847; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 229
1831 - 1863

Happiness, Secret, Beauty, Art

“I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed): Art. Stephen Sondheim p. 408

Idea

“Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.”

Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949) British writer and journalist

"Tennyson and W. H. Auden", p. 78
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)

Love, Men, Fear

“The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Truth, Art, Effort, Change

“The Emperor learnt from a secret news writer of Delhi that in Jaisinghpura Bairagis used to worship idols, and that the Censor on hearing of it had gone there, arrested Sri Krishna Bairagi and taken him with 15 idols away to his house; then the Rajputs had assembled flocked to the Censor's house, wounded three footmen of the Censor and tried to seize the Censor himself; so that the latter set the Bairagi free and sent the copper idols to the local subahdar.'…”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Akhbarat, cited in Sarkar, Jadu Nath, History of Aurangzeb,Volume III, Calcutta, 1972 Impression. p. 186-189., quoted in part in Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
Quotes from late medieval histories

Secret, Housing

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Quotes about writer page 7

Quotes about writer
page 7