Role Of The Writer Quotes & Sayings

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness. — Anais Nin

Mom's a writer, so I grew up reading scripts and I have a real respect for them and I know how much thought goes into creating a role, so I'm always interested to find out what was the thought process of the writer and how best can I convey it rather than trying to change it to suit myself. — Naomie Harris

He who has experienced the mystery of the nature is full of life, full of love, full of joy. Radiance emanates from the whole existence itself, it does not know the meaning of holding back. It is pure giving-giving of love. For the great writers, love is like holding ice in hand, it just turns to water and they lose out their role but for a mystic the moment ice transforms to water love starts to flow. — Maitreya Rudrabhayananda

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

So, try to figure out a way to exit your role in the capitalist representation of the writer and his function in the literary community. The events you ritualistically attend and the collaborations you're expected to be part of, are they good for your soul? If they deaden you, exit. If you feel a weakening of the spirit, exit from anything they call literary community. You'll be better off alone. In other words you have to find yourself first. — Anis Shivani

I think the revolutionary role of a writer is to make language that makes coalition possible, language that makes us see things in a new way. — Gloria Steinem

The term 'role model' is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him. — Zadie Smith

In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets. — Etgar Keret

But the fact is, I'm not work-identified. I'm not a lawyer or a writer. I'm a mom, and I'm a woman, and that's the kind of people I want to see in books in the starring role. — Lisa Scottoline

I think my role is as a writer, especially, and then also as a speaker, an organizer, and an entre- preneur of social change. My role isn't to make choices for people-each individual or group needs to do that on their own. But as a writer and a speaker, you can describe possibilities that perhaps haven't been visible before, and aren't in other public dialogues or in the rest of the media. So I suppose I think of myself mainly as an organizer and as someone who describes possibilities. — Gloria Steinem

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor. — W. H. Auden

The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic. — Edward Abbey

As the death of the writer exaggerates the role of his work, the death of a person exaggerates the role of his effect on us. — Albert Camus

One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray. — Tom Skerritt

We often see films with a cast of excellent characters...except one, who's dreadful. We wonder why until we realize that the writer hates this character. He's trivializing and insulting this role at every opportunity. And I'll never understand this. How can a writer hate his own character? It's his baby. How can he hate what he gave life? Embrace all your creations, especially the bad people. They deserve love like everyone else. — Robert McKee

He saw the role of the serious writer as both lofty and practical in the same instant. He used to say that literature was one of the first indications of civilization. He used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache. Like many great healers, he meant to heal himself. — John Cheever

I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts. — J.G. Ballard

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. — Anais Nin

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. — Annie Dillard

I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work. — Richard Flanagan

Benefits of Improv To the Editor: Re "Inmate Improv," by Anna Clark (Op-Ed, Dec. 31): It was not surprising to me that an improvisational theater workshop would help a prison inmate adjust to life after his release. Pretend play has been shown to improve the executive-function skills in preschool and school-age children. These skills include the ability to control emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exercise self-control and discipline. As poor executive-function skills are associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime, it would behoove all adults involved in child-rearing to encourage role-playing or "improv." STEVEN ROSENBERG Fairfield, Conn., Dec. 31, 2014 The writer is director of the Elementary Reading Program at the University of Bridgeport School of Education. — Anonymous

There is no such thing as a Bollywood hero or Hollywood hero. All you see on the screen is the lead actor's interpretation of the role that has been conceived by the writer. — Dhanush

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role. — J.M. Coetzee

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate. — John Barton

That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he steps up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more that the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing. — Michel Foucault

The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea. — Yann Martel

Fitzgerald's work was almost entirely out of print when 'The Lost Weekend' was published in 1944 - even 'Gatsby' seemed well on its way to being forgotten - and Jackson had meant to be 'deliberately prophetic' in calling attention to a writer he considered the foremost chronicler of 'the temper and spirit of the time.' More than twenty years later he finally received credit, in writing, for having played a key role in the so-called Fitzgerald Revival. — Blake Bailey

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning. — Vaclav Havel

The development of an image is a mysterious thing: once a public figure has been cast in a public role, it is almost impossible for him to change the character. It is as if someone has assembled personality traits into a convenient pattern, no writer ever re-examines it: it is easier to use the accepted pattern. — Theodore H. White

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him — Jane Goldman

This isn't a book that I could have written ten years ago. And as much as I'd love to credit that to my growth as a writer, I know it's not really that. Instead it's because of all the people I've met and talked to as an author. And, just as important, it's about all of the things I've been exposed to as a reader, particularly of YA fiction. I am so lucky to be a part of a community of writers that constantly inspires me to write whatever I want to write, no matter how hard it seems. My peers are my role models, and my role models are my peers. Which is extraordinary. Thanks — David Levithan

AL ALCORN. Chief engineer at Atari, who designed Pong and hired Jobs. GIL AMELIO. Became CEO of Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back. BILL ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Mac intosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs's girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa. LISA BRENNAN-JOBS. Daughter of Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer in New York City. NOLAN BUSHNELL. Founder of Atari and entrepreneurial role model for — Walter Isaacson

I don't say no as much as I should. I'm an extreme workaholic. So I can be sick, and I still say yes to anything. When you are the CEO of your own company, editor of your own videos, your own writer ,and you do every role yourself, you have a hard time saying no to opportunities. — Lilly Singh

There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize
it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do. — Stanislaw Lem

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become. — Don DeLillo

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time. — Rod Serling