#writers

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows. ↗

— Edward Koch

#dictate #dictated #first #i #i do

If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#just #lives #more #people #something

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers. ↗

— Jonathan Kozol

#i #own #speak #standards #teachers

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#writers #writing #life

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers. ↗

— Irvin S. Cobb

#good #much #sense #too #too much

I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together. ↗

— Harlan Coben

#anyway #boat #compete #crime #find

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry. ↗

— Robert Hass

#poetry #writers-on-writing #experience

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be. ↗

— Jim Harrison

#ethnicity #how #open #outside #sex

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. ↗

— Suzanne Vega

#certain #civil #experience #follow #formalities

But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role. ↗

— Sean Hayes

#another #because #been #behind #cast