Great Writers Quotes - Page 10

• To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Writing, Humility

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• It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Men, Frying Pans, Chestnuts

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.152, Harvard University Press

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• Great writers are the saints for the godless.

  Anita Brookner

  God, Writing, Saint

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• A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

  Bill Gates

  Technology, Average, Computer

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• Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

  Stephen Fry

  Believe, Names, Intellectual

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• I'm not going to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is. It is home.

  Chris Rose

  Home, Land, Essence

  Chris Rose (2015). “1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina”, p.212, Simon and Schuster

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• One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you're never going to match up and that everybody else's life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day, or you were somehow not invited. And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you.

  Stephen Fry

  Secret, Lessons, Taught

  "Stephen Fry's Idea of Greatness". bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

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• When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer have perished.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Animal, Feels Just, Conservation

  Theodore Roosevelt (2010). “The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilderness, Wildlife, and Wild Places”, p.24, Cambria Press

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• Great writers arrive among us like new diseases - threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

  Craig Raine

  Powerful, Writing, Disease

  Craig Raine (2011). “In Defence of T. S. Eliot”, p.448, Pan Macmillan

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• You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

  Gore Vidal

  Investing, Might, Whining

  "Gore Vidal: What I've Learned". Interview with Mike Sager, www.esquire.com. August 1, 2012.

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• We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

  Allen Ginsberg

  Typewriters, Howl

  Allen Ginsberg (2001). “Howl and Other Poems: Pocket Poets Number 4”, p.24, City Lights Publishers

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• Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.

  Mary Karr

  Girl, Children, Yankee Stadium

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• A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

  Tom Bissell

  Writing, Wish, Doe

  "Truth in Oxiana". Article by Tom Bissell, www.worldhum.com. February 15, 2006.

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