Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening powerful impatient for patients to pick up their virus irresistible.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.

Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

Success breeds volume, and it's just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.

Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing.

What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven't seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn't a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time.

They're pretty particular about what they show. They certainly edit the scripts and have conversations with the writers about what they are and aren't willing to portray. But the writers and the network are pretty much on the same page.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.

I went on a long trip through South America with Prince Charles where I was the only journalist there - a couple of photographers but no other writers.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.