W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Writers who drew, they all seemed to draw the same way. They managed to keep that childlike creativity in their line.”
“Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.”
Source: Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler
“writers who go outside the lines when they draw pictures of the world are seldom rewarded for their efforts.”
Source: Telegraph Avenue then
“Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.”
“Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.”
“Writers who open up horizons for other people are performing a function every bit as important as a consciously politicized writer.”
“Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.”
“Writers who see the existential loneliness of man as I see it – as a longing to be dissolved in the subjectivity of God – have written in ways so obscure that I have real doubts whether I can do any better. I am thinking of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Berdyaev, and also of Hegel, in whose shadow they wrote, and whose vision they confirmed by the very vehemence of their attacks on it.
Hegel argued that we self-conscious beings become what we essentially are, through a process of conflict and resolution. Self-consciousness is implanted in us as a condition to be realized, and we acquire it through Entäusserung – through building the public arena in which the dialogue between self and other can occur. The self becomes real through the recognition of the other. Language, institutions, laws are the vehicles through which we achieve Selbstbestimmung, the certainty of self, which is also a limiting of self and a recognition of the boundary between self and other.
The process that leads me to see myself as other to others also makes me other to myself, and this is the ‘moment’, to use Hegel’s language, of self-alienation, in which subjects become strangers to themselves, bound by external laws, hampered in their freedom and in rebellion against the constraints that press on them from outside.
It is in this way that the fatal fracture splits our world – the fracture between subject and object that runs through me. Healing that fracture means reconciling my own view from somewhere with the competing views by which I am surrounded, so that how I am in the eyes of others matches how I am for myself. For Hegel this is achieved objectively through law and institutions, subjectively through art and religion. These are ways in which we re-connect with the world from which our own struggle for freedom and self-knowledge had separated us. Hölderlin expressed some of this in his great invocations of home and homecoming – the journey outwards, which is also a journey back. And Hölderlin’s spiritual journey has been traced in our time, and through a changed emotional geography, by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets.”
Source: Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
“Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.”
Source: A view from the diners club: essays 1987-1991
“Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.”
“Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.”
“Writers will be judged by what they write.”
“Writers will happen in the best of families.”
Source: Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual
“Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.”
Source: the elements of style
“Writers will see your work and want to try you in different things but I think you have to stay true to your vehicle. We all have a vehicle. Whether it's a thug, or a school child or the babyface or the sex siren or the video vin, whatever it is ride that until the wheels fall off and eventually, if you build your foundation then you can branch off.”
“Writers work their words into wonders.”
“Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing.”
“Writers would hate me saying this, and I love words, but I have to say that cinema exists, on one level, for the power of the big image and what that image does.”
“Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.”
“Writers write about what worries them.”
“Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.”
“Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.”
“Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it's nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.”
“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”
“Writers write to understand, and readers read with a secret hope that someone else does.”
Source: Hearth Fires
“Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.”
“Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.”
Source: The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes
“Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.”
“Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.”
“Writers' communities are very helpful to writers because it gives them a way to try out their stuff short of publication.”
“Writers, actors, anybody working on an ensemble-type thing, there are going to be some creaks in the beginning. It seems like there's tremendous potential in just letting things sort of breathe a little bit. It's tremendously important.”
“Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.”
“Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.”
“Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.”
“Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories...The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.”
“Writers, Composers, Painters, - also artists like directors and actors fall into the same category. They have to be handled with kid gloves, mentally and physically”
“Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.”
Source: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way—then because they also have depression, I think they’re more in touch with human suffering.”
Source: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.”
Source: The Works of Edmund Burke: With a Memoir
“Writers, good ones, don't tell stories.
Characters show stories.”
Source: Fiction is folks: how to create unforgettable characters
“Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.”
“Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.”
“Writers, like most human beings, are adaptable creatures. They can learn to accept subordination without growing fond of it. No writer can forever stand in the wings and watch other people take the curtain calls while his own contributions get lost in the shuffle.”
“Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.”
“Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when
they are alone.”
Source: Wonder Boys
“Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.”
“Writers. For some reason, a lot of you reject what you hear and see in your heads. If you go too long ignoring it, it builds up and then you do all sorts of weird things. Mumble to yourself. Nightmares. Day-dreams. Total anarchy and chaos. Before you know it, the writer is either sitting in corner feverishly humming to his- or herself or on Prozac. You’re not on Prozac, are you? (Esther)”
Source: In Other Worlds
“Writers: believe! And go do the work . . .”
“Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to “write through it,” because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.”
“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”