Great Writers Quotes - Page 9

• The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.

  Cal Thomas

  Book, Years, Lists

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• People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer.

  Yann Martel

  Men, Sea, People

  Interview, www.bookbrowse.com. October 2, 2002.

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• I've been dreaming about having a press forever, like the '90s. I've always known so many great writers who aren't as connected to the publishing world as they should be, and I have the energy and the enthusiasm to sort of gather and promote people, so I've always thought someday I might embark on a big project like that.

  Michelle Tea

  Dream, People, Forever

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

  Rebecca Miller

  Stories, Want, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm just in profound gratitude that we get to go back and work on a show that we love, with amazing actors and great writers, and be a part of the Marvel universe. As with all of the characters in Jessica Jones, Trish has an alias.

  Rachael Taylor

  Gratitude, Character, Profound

  Source: collider.com

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• On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years.

  Dahlia Lithwick

  Years, Lost, Court

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

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• When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  School, Law, People

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ... 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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