Now I am a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use, as you might say of a bad writer — his writing is good enough for him.
writerquotes
Logographos, a writer of speeches for others to use.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
A writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.
Our job as a writer is to represent the world and to bear witness to it.
Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
copyright / curse / literature / Payment / writer
The effectiveness of an author turns chiefly upon his getting the reputation that he should be read. But by practicing various arts, by the operation of chance, and by certain natural affinities, this reputation is quickly won by a hundred worthless people: while a worthy writer may come by it very slowly and tardily. The former possess friends to help them; for the rabble is always a numerous body which holds well together. The latter has nothing but enemies; because intellectual superiority is everywhere and under all circumstances the most hateful thing in the world, and especially to bunglers in the same line of work, who want to pass for something themselves. This being so, it is a prime condition for doing any great work – any work which is to outlive its own age, that a man pay no heed to his contemporaries, their views and opinions, and the praise or blame which they bestow.
author / reputation / work / writer
It will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and, after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive accepter of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.
When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.