Quotes of: American-writers Keyword

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.

Elric: The Stealer of Souls

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.

Best Behavior

The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.

Beautiful Monsters

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.

On Becoming a Novelist

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting It Right

Thing about boats is, you can always sell them if you don't like them. Can't sell kids.

Bull Canyon: A Boatbuilder, a Writer and Other Wildlife

Twitter is the most amazing medium for a comedy writer. I can't get in every idea I want on the show no matter how hard I try to bully the other writers, so it's a way of me getting out other comic ideas and immediately getting feedback.

Mindy Kaling

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.

How to Like Everything: A Utopia

Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts. It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life

What are minnows but brief flashes? And what are thoughts? And how do you capture a brief flash, even for a second?

The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life

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.

Poe

My life felt so cluttered and obstructed that I could hardly breathe. I inhabited a closed, concentrated world, airless and without exits.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression

For many people, depression is an abrupt change in an otherwise full and happy life. It emerges suddenly and devastates by its very strangeness and pathology.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Characters are the lifeblood of any good book.

The Writer's Tune-up Manual: 35 Exercises That Will Scrape the Rust Off Your Writing

...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.

Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers

I’m not an unproductive liar—I’m a productive fiction writer. I make stuff. I make stuff up. 

Whenever You're Gone, I'm Here For You

Wretched game, cricket, keeping romantic youths out in the sun when they should be indoors, applying balm to the foreheads of feverish young maidens.

Scenes from a Writer's Life