Writer Quotes

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Ben hikâyeciyim diye sizlerden ayrı şeyler düşünecek değilim. Sizin düşündüklerinizden başka bir şey de düşünemem. O halde bu adamın hikâyesi ne olabilir? Sakın benden büyük vakalar beklemeyin, n'olur?”
― Sait Faik Abasıyanık, Lüzumsuz Adam

“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“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

“No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan, The Beggar's Prophecy

“A writer should show the silver in his hands neither as bronze nor as gold; the gist of the matter is to show silver as silver.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan, The Beggar's Prophecy

“— ARRÊTE-TOI, ESPÈCE DE CHOU FARCI À LA CANNELLE !
Après trois-allers retours et au moins autant de points de côté, je suis la première à abandonner la course, à bout de souffle. Ma condition physique ne me permet pas de courir plus de cinq minutes sans m’effondrer. Encore sept secondes, et c’était le malaise assuré !”
― Tiphaine Bleuvenn, Mes Amours éponymes 1

“I don't write to sell books, I write because my mind teeters on the edge of psychosis if I spend a single day without writing.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“I don't write to sell books,
I write because my mind succumbs
to psychosis, if I don't write.
I don't write to sell books,
I write because I fall to pieces, even
at the thought of not being able to write.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Labor of AI (The Sonnet)

Asking AI to help you
write, is not writing.
Asking AI to tune your
voice, is not singing.

Asking AI to help you
paint, is not painting.
Asking AI to help you
code, is not coding.

Asking AI to help you
create, is not creativity.
Asking AI to build your
dream, is not dreaming.

Asking AI to narrate
books, is not storytelling.
AI oughta do manual labor,
so humans can do the creating.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“All women write stories. It’s just that only some transcribe them.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“Writing your thoughts in a journal helps a lot, when you don't find the right people to talk to.”
― Avijeet Das