Writer Quotes

When I use the term “complex realism”, what I’m suggesting is that the writer must be realist, always realist, but not realist in the sense we have usually used the term in literature.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

I’ve come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.

That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

For 35 years I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren’t funny. Some of them weren’t appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.

Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.