Writer Quotes

“A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson:

“When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.”
― David Leavitt

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.

The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer's head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.”
― Jyoti Arora

“You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

“Naturally, this country can't stand truth.”
― Lewis H. Michaux

“12.
Se escrevo o que sinto é porque assim diminuo a febre de sentir. O que confesso não tem importância,
pois nada tem importância


Por: Bernado Soares
In: Livro do Desassossego”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.”
― Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

“The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.”
― Jennifer Egan

“Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.”
― David Scheier

“When people starts to enjoy a writer's pen, he becomes a legend even if his stories are neither long nor publicly surrounded by expectations.”
― A. Saleh

“THE MANY FACES OF SURVIVAL

Sunday, August 10th at 2:00 PST

Dachau Liberator, medical whistle-blower, award winning writer, college professor and world renowned garlic farmer, Chester Aaron, talks about the hard choices he’s had to make, why he made them, and how it’s changed his life.

Mr. Aaron was recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, and received the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship which was chaired by Aldous Huxley and Tomas Mann. He also inspired Ralph Nader to expose the over-radiation of blacks in American hospitals.

Now Mr. Aaron is a world-renowned garlic farmer who spends his days writing about the liberation of Dachau. He is 86 years old and he has a thousand stories to tell. Although he has published over 17 books, he is still writing more and looks forward to publishing again soon.”
― Judy Gregerson

“To make this world a whole lot brighter,
when I grow up I'll be a writer.”
― Lee Bennett Hopkins, Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life

“A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy... so it was, I think, with Dryden.”
― Raleigh, Sir Walter

“The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, نيران صديقة

“نحن لا يمكن أن نجبر فناناً على أن يعمل بخلاف ما تمليه عليه طبيعته وإلا كنا نجبره على التصنع والتكلف، وهذا شر لا يمكن أن يؤذي الأدب والفن، والمسألة في غاية البساطة مع ذلك، فإذا كنا نتيح للفنان حريته كاملة، فنحن أيضاً أحرار في تقييمنا للأعمال الفنية، فلا نمنح تقديرنا إلا لمن يقدم لنا العمل الفني الكامل، وهو العمل الفني الرفيع فنياً النافع إنسانياً واجتماعياً”
― توفيق الحكيم, ملامح داخلية

“Writer is always alone. But every author is a creator, and gods are lonely.”
― Lara Biuts, The Sunless Parlour

“Miss, I'd gladly pay you to remove your clothes.”
― David Scheier

“i tried to lick a knife clean / but it just slit me / they said i’d forget about you / but i still slip you into my poetry”
― Arabella Leyla, Nothings: A Poetry Collection

“you’d always be in my heart / but i’m scared to admit / maybe it is as it seems / that the sentences i delete will always be the real me”
― Arabella Leyla

“i write because it won’t stop / you never made my heart stop / i never felt anything for you at all / that doesn’t even begin to start the long list of lies i had to mop up”
― Arabella Leyla

“i deleted each word i wrote for you / each thing you never knew / you can’t swallow this, but i wish on it you’d just choke / i feel so nauseous at the fact that you know”
― Arabella Leyla, Nothings: A Poetry Collection

“i write to try to know what i felt / to lay out the cards i’ve been dealt / as if that will make them aces”
― Arabella Leyla, Nothings: A Poetry Collection

“i still don’t know what i felt after all this time / they haven’t made enough words / haven't committed enough crime / haven't been desperate enough to put this kind of feeling into a simple line”
― Arabella Leyla, Nothings: A Poetry Collection

“so i write books / every single day / and try to give myself a say / but i’ve never had one anyway”
― Arabella Leyla, Nothings: A Poetry Collection

“i write before i think / i write before i breathe / i write before i feel / i write because i’m real.”
― Arabella Leyla

“I really can't say I've done much with my writing up to this point aside from sitting on it, an ever-growing pile of hidden scribbles, secrets unintended, metastasizing and shifting about just beneath me. Sure, I've posted tidbits of creative work on outdated online forums, Facebook groups, transient little Reddit communities, and other such sparsely populated corners of the Internet, but all[-]in[-]all I've long wanted to shed a brighter light on my efforts. (And one less obstructed by the datasphere, at
that.)

Well[,] hell, maybe not a single book will ever emerge from my hands and onto a printed
page. ["]Hope for the best[,] but expect the worst["]—right? Certainly, worse things have happened to
people.

I sometimes like to half-jokingly tell myself that my only hope for seeing my ink-on-paper ambitions realized lies in a cadre of extraterrestrial archaeologists one day reaching a dessicated wasteland once called Earth and retrieving from a pile of rubble the mangled flash drive on which I, some ancient and mysterious scribe or archivist, stored everything from twitterature to unfinished novels to manifestos to pulpy, half-assed attempts at erotica.”
― Vincent St. Clare, Easy Noumenon: Early Poems

“Rise up again, Nepal. That's what you taught me in Life.”
― Avijeet Das