If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.
A. S. Byatt
The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Aaron Ciechanover
I mean, the problem is, I think I'm a great writer.
Aaron Eckhart
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Aaron Sorkin
David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer.
Adam McKay
I started out as an actor, where you seek to understand yourself using the words of great writers and collaborating with other creative people. Then I slid into show business, where you seek only an audience's approval whether you deserve it or not.
Alec Baldwin
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.
Amity Gaige
What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.
Andre Aciman
Great writers are the saints for the godless.
Anita Brookner
I look for strong people. I don't like people who'll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that's reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to 'The Standard.'
Anna Wintour
My dad was an editor and a writer, and that's really where I would have liked to have gone. But the genetic link was not intact there, so I wound up going into business. But I love to write, still. I'm not a great writer, but I enjoy it.
Anne M. Mulcahy
Great writers probably shouldn't be ranked, at least not by me.
Anthony Doerr
By all means, let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes, but let us study them for our guidance: that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.
Ben Kingsley
I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell... who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied.
Bill Clegg
It's great working with great writers and directors because you're getting paid for something you love and want to do.
Bill Duke
There's exceptional work being done on television. Some of our great writers are writing for television. When you have things to choose from, you typically go after the writing - unless you're going after the money. There are fewer opportunities in film to make money with good writing, unless you're an action hero.
Billy Crudup
You know, that's kind of the thing, I can't freestyle and I used to always wonder why I couldn't, and when I would try once out of every six months, but I was always a great writer!
Bubba Sparxxx
I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.
Charlie Puth
That's why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.
I'm not a great writer of literature. I'm an entertainer.
As a director, you want to work with great writers.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
There's lots of things that can't make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of great writers who don't get published - is it still worthwhile? Aren't we glad people are still doing it?
I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we'd consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or maybe they may not be very good at memory, and are not particularly good at these kinds of tests.
I guess when I was younger, I'd have assumed that in 2008 music would be full of great writers following in the tradition of the young great writers of the '60s and '70s, but it hasn't turned out that way, or at least there are no other writers around that I look at and think: 'Wow, I'm outclassed, I need to get out of this business.'
As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy.
My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.
I'm not a great writer.
It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.
The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.
I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'
But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.
I'm not on the run from anything and I'm not at all clear about what I'm running towards. But as some great writer put it, I want to be certain that when I arrive at death, I'm totally exhausted.
I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.
I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.
Lincoln is a genius of language and a brilliant writer who deserves to be seen as part of the canon of great writers in American literature.
I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.
A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
I've known Shawn for several years. And he's just an amazing talent. He's a great writer, a marvelous, marvelous guitar player, and plays really good fiddle.
It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that.
Luckily, each generation brings forth great writers, actors, directors, and designers.
I believe we all have the capacity to be masters of many things, and there's nothing that we can't do. You can be a great actor and also be a great writer. There's so many things that all of us have the capacity to do. But somehow, life tries to convince us that we'd be lucky to do even one thing well, and I disagree.
The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.