Great Writers Quotes - Page 9

• I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer . . . if he can only . . . tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes.

  Clive Barnes

  Heart, Soul And Body, People

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• When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation.

  Jude Law

  Book, Play, Appreciate

  "Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law On Set Interview SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS". Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. November 14, 2011.

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• Great writers know what to cut out. It's the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.

  Donald Miller

  Ambition, Cutting, Stories

  Twitter post from Jun 17, 2015

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• Roles came to me. I was very, very lucky in that respect. Great directors, great writers, great producers - they saw something in me that they wanted for their picture or their play or whatever it was, whether it was Edward Albee or whether it was - or Peter Hall, directors. They would come to me, thank God. I was lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

  Angela Lansbury

  Play, Thank God, Directors

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know.

  Marvin Mudrick

  Friendship, Beautiful, Wise

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• Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Crafts, Stealing, Mediocre

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• Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

  Greil Marcus

  Reading, Writing, Mean

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• I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.

  Terry Pratchett

  Book, Thinking, Style

  "Terry Pratchett on his latest novel, his medical diagnosis, and more". Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. November 16, 2012.

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• Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

  Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

  Writing, Judging, Down And

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• That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.

  James Frey

  Believe, Stories, Done

  Interview with Toby Litt, tobylitt.wordpress.com. February 5, 2015.

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• I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.

  Walter Cronkite

  Writing, Skills, News

  Source: articles.latimes.com

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• ... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.

  Marcel Proust

  Love, Happy, Kindness

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• Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Dancer, Competition

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• As actors, we were fighting that tooth and nail because of fear, because language is a crutch and dialogue is a crutch, and it's so easy to just have a great writer write you a line.

  Charlize Theron

  Writing, Fighting, Teeth

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• Everyone has access to a pen and paper, but to be a great writer is difficult.

  Pamela Yates

  Paper, Difficult, Pens

  "LatinoBuzz: Pamela Yates on How Her Documentary Helped Jail a Guatemalan Dictator for Genocide" by Vanessa Erazo, www.indiewire.com. May 22, 2013.

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• I hate to see great writers like Ringel and Ansen and Jan Stuart (among many others) being put out to pastures because print media is suffering.

  Alonso Duralde

  Hate, Print Media, Suffering

  Source: editorial.rottentomatoes.com

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• Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

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• As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.

  Judith Thurman

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  "Ask the Author Live: Judith Thurman on Laura Ingalls Wilder". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. July 31, 2009.

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• The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.

  August Wilson

  Writing, Mean, Play

  Interview with Miles Marshall Lewis, believermag.com. November 1, 2004.

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• I would just like to see hip-hop journalism in general take a step up and match the artistry. There have been great writers in music who are the caliber of artist as a writer as the people that they're covering.

  Brother Ali

  Artist, People, Hip Hop

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.

  Patti Smith

  Thinking, Ancestry, Gender

  Source: www.oceanstar.com

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• Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.

  Roger Rosenblatt

  Understanding, Example, Use

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• I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol.

  Steven Seagal

  Sex, Great Day, Actors

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

  Gertrude Stein

  Literature, Mouths, Portraits

  Gertrude Stein, Robert Bartlett Haas (1971). “A primer for the gradual understanding of Gertrude Stein”

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• Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Writing, Artist

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories”, p.46, H. P. Lovecraft

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