c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Those who generate fog are Wizards of Oz hoping desperately that nobody pulls the curtain to reveal a trembling little writer behind it. This seldom happens. Readers who dare to point out that incomprehensible writing can't be comprehended risk being told that the problem is theirs.
— Ralph Keyes
It’s about the possibility, or otherwise, of meaning in the world. And the possibility, or otherwise, of writing. And the possibility, or otherwise, of the resolution of everything into some coherent, cogent vision.
— Tom McCarthy
People should think that being a writer is cool. Even if you’re just a starving writer. Besides, most great writers were starving at one point or another. It comes with the title.
— Zack Love, Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC
I would be happy to take credit for all of the wonderful experiences I describe in my novels, but my life isn’t quite that rich. Unfortunately we authors are sometimes forced to use other people’s lives, too.”“Sounds rather beastly,” the journalist laughed. “Or maybe writers are like vultures. Some people feel we journalists are.” He mimicked a bird of prey and grinned.
— Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society
Even the best cook can’t make chicken soup out of his own feet. There aren’t so terribly many ingredients in anyone’s life, less meat than there is on a sparrow. The average person could come up with at most two good novels. Many who think very highly of themselves can’t manage more than a couple of anecdotes.
— Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society
A writer is someone who analyses the society, people and the world around him or her. Simply a writer is someone who pays attention to the utmost simple things happening around him or her. I believe the best things about being a writer is, you are going to live forever through your work, in your books, in the hearts of your readers, in your characters.
— Ama H. Vanniarachchy
It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me.
— Tom McCarthy
Characters have to be seen and felt when written, not told about. Writers are merely vessels of their manifestations.
— Linda Durbin
Literature is language charged with meaning
— Ezra Pound
A hammer made of deadlines is the surest tool for crushing writer's block.
— Ryan Lilly
Readers are the glue that binds the books together.
— J.E.B. Spredemann
#Writers, #artists , and #poets don't get the respect they deserve until they are either dead, or they cut off an ear Mozaiah T.﻿
— Mozaiah Thompson
The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that's the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.
— R.D. Ronald
I have a great book. It’s called Stantasyland. Except I don’t have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keep enough to go over the line, to get itself with the work that is taken seriously, one has to have had either an unusual knowledge of or a peculiar sympathy with the characters one handles. One can’t write about what one most admires always—you must, by some accident, have seen into your character very deeply, and it is this accident of intense realization of him that give your writing about him tone and distinction, that lifts it above the commonplace, in other words
— Willa Cather, The Selected Letters
Beginning hook readers. Endings create fans.
— Martha Alderson, The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master
Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.
— Anne Rice, The Wolf Gift
I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.
— André Gide
Does rejection ever get any easier? Only if we decide not to invest emotion in the dismissal…
— Martha Alderson, Blockbuster Plots: Pure & Simple
As I build sentences, I roll them sometimes on my mouth to taste them as I write them. I have this emptying of the mind and the focusing on that single thing, that infinitesimal moment and there is perfection, you know, as if I exist fully in that nanosecond of emotion.
— Trinity Jones, A Rock Song for Poet Girl
How do I get inspired? Life.
— Alex G. Zarate
Why would anyone pay for writing anymore when there's Facebook and why would anyone pay for music anymore when there's YouTube.
— Lisa Bedrick, On Christian Hot Topics
We all have a place within us, that would like to rewrite the way our life was written out for us....That's why people want to become authors.„
— Tracie Molton, Genetically Altered
Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.
— Christos Tsiolkas, Barracuda
I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.
— Christos Tsiolkas
I couldn’t admit to any of the boys I hung out with that I wanted to fuck ’em, so my erotic life was in my imagination and in the body.
— Christos Tsiolkas
The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.
— Christos Tsiolkas
My ideas are a shapeless mass that my writing molds into beauty.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Replace your old books with the books you’ve always wanted to write.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today.
— Nelson Algren
Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.
— Christos Tsiolkas
By writing, we partake in something greater than ourselves. Pick up pen and paper or take a seat at your computer today and create something of beauty.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?
— Peter Watts, Echopraxia
It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.
— Louise Glück
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
— Ernest Hemingway
Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? "Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat..." That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!
— Jim C. Hines, The Prosekiller Chronicles: Rise of the Spider Goddess -- An Annotated Novel
It's a phenomenal experience jumping from the devious mind of a sorceress bent on conquering the world to the compassionate musing of a queen capable of healing life with a touch—all in a flicker of thought. That's why I love writing.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
...writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the spot where we stand.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth” – I rap my knuckles on the table – “you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.
— Christos Tsiolkas
Jenny Marzen is who again?" Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn't know it. "And Jenny is my number one fan?""No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school.""What is she, twelve?""The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you've got gravitas.""That's a dirty lie. I never even had mono.
— Jincy Willett, Amy Falls Down
Don’t panic. If you write, you’ll be a writer.
— Whitney Otto
The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa.
— Chuck Wendig, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing
Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!
— Carl William Brown, Aforismi geniali di William Shakespeare.
When you fall in love with a writer you will never die.
— Anonymous
People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses — especially the older ones — functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop.
— Jincy Willett, Amy Falls Down
The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.
— Jasper Fforde
A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."(on Ezra Pound)
— Gertrude Stein
My father once admonished me to master the laws that govern fine writing until I could weave my words into worlds. If ever I accomplish that feat, I will sign my name to the tale.
— Brandon Mull, A World Without Heroes
Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it.
— Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know
In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction.
— Josh Malerman
What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
— Gustave Flaubert
Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.
— Edmund White
As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imitation of anyone. It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'. the syle, for sure, is rough,and the writing is clumsy. She even gets the title wrong: she's confusing 'chrysalis' and 'cocoon'. You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. the overall plots is a fantasy, but the descriptive details is incredibly real.The balance between the two is excellent. I don't know if words like 'originality' or Inevitability' fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it's not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression- it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don’t share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.
— Richard Flanagan
If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to the reader.
— Aman Jassal, Rainbow - the shades of love
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain)
— William Faulkner
That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.
— Zia Haider Rahman
Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.
— Gore Vidal
Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you.
— Zia Haider Rahman
Writers are disguised "sorcerers". Armed with their mighty pens, they cast spells on their readers using words that could pierce right through the heart and soul. If our writings moved you, made you cry, made you think deeper, and sort of changed your perspective about things, then we can say, we had you under our "spell". - Elizabeth Esguerra Castillo's Quotes
— Elizabeth E. Castillo
Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.
— William Giraldi
There was a day when writers actually read," he grumbles. "They could quote Keats and Socrates. Now anyone with a keyboard and a fifth-grade education can call themselves a writer.
— J. Lincoln Fenn, Poe
We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today's writing falls into the first category.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie.
— Nikita Dudani
My only wish is to be buried with my books.
— Nikita Dudani
When dealing with writers it breaks down like this: a regular writer is your average everyday megalomaniac. Like every artist, there's a part of them that believes--nay, knows--the world turns for them. Most are harmless. Some are obnoxious. Some are Bret Easton Ellis.
— Hannah Strom-Martin
A writer is never just looking out of a window or staring into space. They are building a universe to share with the world
— Brenda Ashworth Barry
The truth is that most writers are needy.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If we are artists- hell, whether or not we're artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn't have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:  Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. 
   The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. 
   The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. 
   Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. 
   Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. 
   The starters of crazes.Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. 
 
— Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader's great experience.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer.
— James Hilton, Random Harvest
And it’s great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn’t end. Oh, and ‘selfies’! If I could clap my hands and burn out every camera phone in the world, I swear I’d do it!
— George R.R. Martin
To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare.
— Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works
If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.
— George R.R. Martin
Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.
— Margaret Atwood
I find myself nursing keen regret at probably not being able to live long enough to explain properly to you what I do not myself pretend to know. But since it has been proved that by an extraordinary chance I have not yet lost my life since that far-off time when, filled with terror, I began the preceding sentence, I mentally calculate that it will not be useless here to construct the complete avowal of my basic impotence, especially when it is a matter (as at present) of this imposing & inaccessible question. It is, generally speaking, a singular thing that the attractive tendency which induces us to seek out (in order to then express them) the resemblances & differences concealed in the natural properties of the most conflicting objects, & on the surface sometimes the least apt to lend themselves to this kind of sympathetically curious combination, which -upon my word -gracefully add to the style of the writer, who for personal satisfaction requites himself with the impossible & unforgettable appearance of an owl grave until eternity.
— Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I've probably put my 10,000 hours into writing, but I believe writing well is also greatly influenced by certain intangibles like mood and inspiration.
— Bill Loguidice
Writer does nothing,But think deeply.
— Shashank Rayal
Some writers are born. Others learn. I was born a writer but have a lot to learn.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers that write at all.
— Renata Adler, Speedboat
Writers,” Esther said simply. “For some reason, a lot of you reject what you hear and see in your heads. If you go too long ignoring it, it builds up and then you do all sorts of weird things. Mumble to yourself. Nightmares. Daydreams. Total anarchy and chaos. Before you know it, the writer is either sitting in a corner feverishly humming to his- or herself or on Prozac.
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, In Other Worlds
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
— Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen
If you have a story inside you but don't know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.
— Shanda Trofe Write from the Heart
I'm not interested in the reviews by critics over the age of 15.
— Mark A. Cooper
Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.
— Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm
Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.
— Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm
It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.
— Robert E. Howard
Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost thoughts and emotions onto a page for the entire world to examine? Even in fiction, we give a map to our most secret feelings. Why do writers do it? Perhaps because we'd be crazier still if we didn't.
— Leland Dirks
Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Writers leave a trail of magic everywhere they go.
— Jo Linsdell
Every artist takes their final work to the grave.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.
— Robert  Black
But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.
— Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway
One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.
— Patricia C. Wrede
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.
— George Jean Nathan
How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.
— William Saroyan
Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that’s what writers do, they make contexts.
— Paul Shepheard, How to Like Everything: A Utopia
The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx.
— Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring
The difference between writers and readers is similar to the difference between expressionism and impressionism. Writers want to express themselves and readers want to be impressed.
— Claire  Amber
Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.
— Crystal Evans, Jamaican Acute Ghetto Itis
Write a page a day and you'll have a complete novel in year.
— Harry Whittington
I before E except after C. Weird?By rebelling against the rules the word itself denotes its very meaning: of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.I think all writers are weird.
— Day Parker
(musicians always make straight for the piano in anybody’s house, unlike writers, who can ignore a typewriter in the same room forever.)” -- margaret case harriman
— Margaret Harriman
I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser.Well, let’s talk Algeria then. Let’s talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.
— Rawi Hage, Carnival
Please then, can we stop this obsession with the tiny minority of writers who have made a fortune from their work, and/or those who look hot in their author pics. Please can we also stop dissolving into factions of the bestselling, the midlist, the self-published, the Hampstead-dwelling, those who like to write cheerful stories and those who prefer to write grim ones. And instead take a proper and considered look at the future of the entire profession of writing.
— Caroline Sanderson
Authors are but the instrument to be played. The art is inside them, but many people help create it.
— Love The Stacks Bookstore
Not everyone will like what you write but there's a certain group who'll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.
— David Chuka
We’re happier when the assholes are villains.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Real writers write. Period. No, the muse does not come to visit everyday. She’s a lazy, precocious flirt. You cannot get into the habit of being “in the mood” to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write. They get the words on the page. Period. So stop waiting for your muse. Trust me, she sleeps around.
— Darynda Jones
Art is long and life is short.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don’t like to read
— Khaled Hosseini
Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Trust the tale, not the teller.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books – it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
I’m sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for the lunch bell. I wish them well. They have, however, never been the subjects of novels, and in all likelihood, will never be.
— Michael Cunningham
Everybody is Other in Maupin.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
— Mark Slouka, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations
The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.
— Robert De Niro
When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.
— Charlotte Eriksson
I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing--and reading--is a solitary business. And it’s good to know I’m not alone.
— Shannon Celebi
The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.
— Joy Williams
They say a writer is not a single person, it is a bunch of characters. What I learned from life is that everyone is a bunch of characters, characters who live and die within us. The moment I was raped, many characters in me died. I lost most of my characteristics. Several new characters were born, one was rage, second was a lifelong unhappiness and third was the fear of helplessness.
— Himanshu Chhabra
Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.
— Iris Chang
Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed in.
— Noah Cicero, Best Behavior
Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew
The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.
— Joy Williams
And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.
— Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Reaping October
Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
— Joan Didion
It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
An author is similar to an actor. They play many characters in their lives—photographer, nurse, dancer, doctor, writer, etc. As an author, you have to learn your craft, know each and every element to become that character you’re writing about to be able to live and breathe what they do.
— Mischa Temaul
Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.
— Ellen J. Barrier, The Price We Must Pay for Our Father's Sins
We need to stop trying to get attention by seeing who can scream and cry the loudest. Write something worth reading and your voice will be heard.
— Teresa Mummert
Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Sometimes we need fellow radicals to remind us of what we, as writers, have set out to proclaim.
— Michael Graves, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered
Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds
— Niall Williams, History of the Rain
To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
— Grace Paley, Fidelity: Poems
People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.
— Robert Coover
Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true.
— Sara Sheridan
Many writers make the mistake of making their readers appear like Lazarus, without any iota of care, throwing down books to readers to crunch as if they are dogs.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
There are as many different kinds of books as there are writers - as many different responses as there are readers.
— Sara Sheridan
Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.
— Sara Sheridan
I think it's incomparably sweet when someone writes something for you.. even if it doesn't rhyme or even if it isn't very amorous.. even two lines of hatred written for you acknowledges the fact that someone spent a little of his time thinking about you.
— Sanhita Baruah
Being able to read well in public and talk about your work in an engaging fashion is part of most writers' job specification.
— Sara Sheridan
If you write without reading, you will certainly have too many books without readers.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.
— John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our working environment will be a change for the better.
— Sara Sheridan
Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.
— Sara Sheridan
Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.
— Sara Sheridan
The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.
— Sara Sheridan
To write a good book, you must read one book for each page of the book you are about to write.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.
— Sara Sheridan
Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!
— Sara Sheridan
Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric.
— Sara Sheridan
While in England write or get wrought rotten rusted.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
99% of natural poets discovered their talents through love letters.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951
Write at a pace that doesn't surpass your creative flow. Don't be hasty; don't be sloppy. Don't forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you'll find that it is harder to make bad writing good than to make good writing better.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.
— Gaston Leroux
There are two kinds of writers
—  those that make you think and those that make you wonder.
Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.
— Sara Sheridan
Writers need each other.
— Sara Sheridan
I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.
— Sara Sheridan
When a writer first begins to write, he or she feels the samefirst thrill of achievement that the young gambler or oboeplayer feels: winning a little, losing some, the gambler sees theglorious possibilities, exactly as the young oboist feels an indescribablethrill when he gets a few phrases to sound like realmusic, phrases implying an infinite possibility for satisfactionand self-expression. As long as the gambler or oboist is onlyplaying at being a gambler or oboist, everything seems possible.But when the day comes that he sets his mind on becoming a professional, suddenly he realizes how much there is to learn, how little he knows.
— John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.
— Sara Sheridan
Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.
— Sara Sheridan
Scotland consistently produces world-class writers.
— Sara Sheridan
Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.
— Sara Sheridan
People visit exposed and vulnerable
—  writers live there
Good writers can't die. Their words live on forever.
— Kensington Gore
When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. — It is not fair. — He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. — I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it — but fear I must.
— Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters
Don't think too much. There'll be time to think later. Analysis won't help. You're chiseling now. You're passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There's something there. It isn't your business yet to know whether it's going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you've carved the tree. You've chiseled the marbled. You've begun.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Writers begin with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.
— Robert  Black
When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.
— Sam Shepard, True West
I became a writer so that the voices inside my head would become an acceptable occurrence.
— Janae Mitchell
I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time, – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit