Great Writers Quotes - Page 5

• The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

  Irwin Shaw

  Literature, Care, Ifs

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• For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Country, Government

  "An Abkhazian Mark Twain" by Susan Jacoby, www.nytimes.com. May 15, 1983.

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• I don't consider myself a great writer, but I would like to think that I can at least proof- read.

  Aimee Mann

  Thinking, Proof, I Can

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• For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. ...Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers.

  Peter Drucker

  Communication, Caring, Community

  "The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition". Book by Peter F. Drucker, 1993.

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• One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph... and see those sentences rising up... and... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that....' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence... to... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me.... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work.

  Gina Berriault

  Beautiful, Dream, Moving

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• One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.

  Karen MacNeil

  Reading, Wine, Two

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• A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.

  Andre Maurois

  Writing, Giving, Essentials

  "The Art of Writing". Book by Andre Maurois, 1960.

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• There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.

  Rex Stout

  Damn

  "An Interview with Mister Rex Stout" by Robert van Gelder, The New York Times, September 21, 1941.

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• There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers. People seem to think there is some connection between talking and writing, but I love to talk and if there were some connection between the two of them I would be the most prolific writer in the history of the world.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Writing, Thinking, Talking

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• The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

  Vanessa Redgrave

  Laughter, Drama, Character

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• All great writers begin with a good leather binding and a respectable title.

  James M. Barrie

  Titles, Neverland, Leather

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• A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

  Alain de Botton

  Matter, Moments, Significant

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• Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write.

  Dolph Lundgren

  Stars, Writing, Past

  Source: movieweb.com

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• it is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.

  Erica Jong

  Hate, Sometimes, Unusual

  Erica Jong (1994). “The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller”, p.32, Grove Press

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• The letters of famous people can be placed into two categories: there is the type of letter which becomes itself a valuable contribution to literature through its wit, style or wisdom; another kind is that whose main importance lies in the provision of a background to their author's life. Especially in the correspondence of great writers and poets, these two factors are very often combined.

  Muriel Spark

  Lying, Two, People

  Muriel Spark (2014). “The Essence of the Brontes: A Compilation with Essays”, p.31, Carcanet

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• 

  Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Honesty, Integrity, Writing

  1847; quoted by propagandist and language maven William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 13 December 1998.

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• I guess I'm not jaded because I still believe that there are good films out there, and there are great directors, and there are great writers. It just takes a little bit more perseverance and a little bit more time to find [them].

  Elijah Wood

  Perseverance, Believe, Directors

  Source: www.aboutfilm.com

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• My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

  Grace Paley

  Jobs, Writing, People

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• Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

  Barack Obama

  Book, Writing, Class

  Barack Obama's remarks in a National Address to America's Schoolchildren at the Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. September 8, 2009.

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• Pour e  crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e  crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a'   l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a'   en chacun de nous, mais a'   le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Writing, Essentials

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• I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

  Tom Barbash

  Thinking, Somewhere Else, Stuck

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

  Anne Lamott

  Inspirational, Motivational, Voice

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.28, Anchor

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• The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

  Samuel Johnson

  Time, Powerful, Book

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 6 Apr. 1775)

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• We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Humility, Crafts

  "New York Journal-American" Newspaper, July 11, 1961.

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• It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

  Zoë Heller

  Greatness, Thinking, Keys

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