T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.”
“The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.”
Source: Emerson in His Journals
“The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.”
“The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.”
“The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.”
“The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
Source: America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
“The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.”
“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.”
“The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.”
“the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.”
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.”
Source: The Great Novels and Short Stories of Somerset Maugham: One of the Finest Writers of Short Stories Who Ever Lived
“The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.”
Source: There Was a Country: A Memoir
“The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.”
“The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”
“The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.”
“The writer is the engineer of the human soul.”
“The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.”
“The writer is the midwife of understanding.”
“The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.”
Source: Conversations with Don DeLillo
“The writer is the person who stays in the room.”
“The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns.”
“The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.”
“The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers
“The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them.”
“The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work-especially his first full-length book-and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence.”
“The writer, like a murderer, needs a motive.”
Source: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
“The writer loves the fog as it pours in; he loves the sun when the fog pours out. The rest of California is Beach Boys country, but San Francisco has that moody thing going on, those blues notes wrapped in moisture, an atmosphere that tempers California dreaming and makes life more real. The fog brings reality, but it is still a California reality, one spent outdoors the whole year round.”
Source: A Writer's San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul
“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”
Source: Collected Works
“The writer must always leave room for the characters to grow and change. If you move your characters from plot point to plot point, like painting by the numbers, they often remain stick figures. They will never take on a life of their own. The most exciting thing is when you find a character doing something surprising or unplanned. Like a character saying to me: ‘Hey, Richard, you may think I work for you, but I don’t. I’m my own person.’”
“The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.”
“The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.”
Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
“The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.”
Source: Psychology and Arthur Miller
“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”
“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”
“The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.”
“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising."
[The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest, May/June 2009)]”
“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.”
“The writer must hew the phantom rock.”
Source: Collected Stories of Carson McCullers
“The writer must know something about the world outside books—whether his or the books of the others. At the same time, he must also be thoroughly acquainted with the world inside books. Words on a page are part of real life. They cannot be substituted for the whole, but they cannot be taken from it either.”
Source: Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life
“The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.”
“the writer must resist this temptation [to quote] and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.”
Source: Streaks of life
“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”
“The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.”
“The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.”
“The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners.”
Source: Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel
“The writer of history is a tragedian in a theatre of the absurd. Airy speculation is not the most tantalizing aspect of his study. Nothing frustrates more than the sight of dynamic hopes moving toward an inevitably disastrous end. The historian can see what the actors of the historical drama could at best suspect. History's basis is hindsight; but hindsight is also history's absurdity.”
Source: Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan
“The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.”
“The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric - but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her "life" boundaries.”
“The writer of murder, like all writers, must be a miser, conceding revelations bit by bit; for every novel is a puzzle, and every reader a sleuth.”
Source: West Heart Kill
“The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.”