Writers Groups Quotes

In TIME June 7, 2010
On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune:
"I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers ... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175." - 5/26/10 ~ Garrison Keillor

According to most writers, groups of souls tend to reincarnate together again and again, working out their karma (debts owed to others and to the self, lessons to be learned) over the span of many lifetimes. In ~ Brian L. Weiss

Lyndon Johnson. The junior congressman saw two things that no one else saw. The first was a possible connection between two groups that had previously had no link: conservative Texas oilmen and contractors - most notably his financial backer, Herman Brown, of Brown & Root - who needed federal contracts and tax breaks and were willing to spend money, a lot of money, to get them; and the scores of northern, liberal congressmen, running for re-election, who needed money for their campaigns. The second was that he could become that link. ~ Robert A. Caro

Every small group has at least one 'difficult' person in it. If you don't immediately recognize who that person is
it's probably you! ~ Rick Warren

Described as a "workaholic speed-writing freak" by fellow writers, a "creative writing class drill sergeant" by his writing 'padawans', Voinov is a self-confessed geek and has enlarged his days by 12 secret hours in return for the sacrifice of ten albino virgin pygmy hippos. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Social revolutions and group revolutions are good, and we need that, but we also need personal revolution - revolution within ourselves that change who we are as people. ~ Ziggy Marley

Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry. ~ David Riesman

Rights are best guarded when each person and group guards for others those rights they wish guarded for themselves. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

Unlike some of my peers, I haven't really hit a writer's block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick. ~ Joni Mitchell

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow. ~ Karl Shapiro

There is an abundance of misinformation, exaggeration, and blatant lies being spread by interest groups regarding the prospects for embryonic stem cell research. ~ Virginia Foxx

I'd say my biggest influences are writers like Andre Norton and, particularly when it comes to the Radch, C.J. Cherryh. ~ Ann Leckie

When my brother, ... , was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: 'Just my luck!' he would say. 'What a pity she was not born a man!' But then I gradually realized that people were saying 'It's bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good,' and since I have avoided writing the simplest character. ~ Murasaki Shikibu

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut - swallows me up like so many remains - I army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.
Such is a writer's life. ~ Chila Woychik

The Nazi Party was, in the early 1920s, but one among many nationalist and volkisch radical political groups. It was catapulted to prominence with the onset of economic recession in the late 1920s ... The Nazis owed their spectacular to a combination of two discrete sets of factors: first, their distinctive organisation and strategy; and secondly, the wider socio-economic conditions which created climates of opinion and sets of grievances on which the Nazis could prey. ~ Mary Fulbrook

Most of the writers I know have somehow managed to stay in touch with that inner child who's never heard of such a thing as an internal editor. ~ JoAnn Ross

You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world. ~ A.S. Byatt

What really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world. ~ Stephen Koch

Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing. ~ Stacey D'Erasmo

Writers are never fully present because they're always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way. ~ Jessica Soffer

I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog. ~ Fran Lebowitz

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.

This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky. ~ Douglas Adams

An author is similar to an actor. They play many characters in their lives - photographer, nurse, dancer, doctor, writer, etc. As an author, you have to learn your craft, know each and every element to become that character you're writing about to be able to live and breathe what they do. ~ Mischa Temaul

Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing. ~ Valerie June

I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself. ~ William S. Burroughs

Writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks. ~ Martha Grimes

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began.

In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years.

I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional. ~ Jeanine Cummins

You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be. ~ A.D. Posey

we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers. Once ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In order to make room for more of God in our life, we need to let go of things that are currently filling our heart and reorder the things that are not ordered properly in Him. The importance of an appropriate detachment from the things of the world-or as they sometimes speak of it, the putting of our lives into the right-is stressed by all the spiritual writers. ~ Ralph Martin

I'm sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I
never met any. ~ Arthur Miller

My audience is made up of two groups of people. The first group includes people whose roots are deep in the Christian faith, but for whom the traditional symbols, as traditionally understood, no longer make sense. The other audience is the audience that has left. I call them the Church Alumni Association, citizens of the secular city. They are a bit nostalgic about this faith of their childhood, but they aren't really interested in trotting it out or becoming involved with it again as it is presently organized. ~ John Shelby Spong

As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them. ~ Billy Collins

Do you know how rare it is in parts of America to actually see 'an outfit'? France? I don't want to be anti-French, but there isn't a more unattractive group of people on the streets. ~ Tom Ford

Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you. ~ Barack Obama

Too many artists and writers have forgotten their roots. I embrace my fans because, in a way, they're family. ~ Jim Steranko

For as long as I write,
I will never be lost. ~ Nikki Rowe

Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature. ~ George Gissing

With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving. ~ Kenneth Rexroth

Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman "the most poetical topic in the world" and I've often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them. I'm ~ Jessica Valenti

I think it's our job as writers for Marvel Comics to continue to create those type of stories that can be mined instead of just trying to give readers exactly what they see on film. ~ Jason Aaron